An unfortunate customer experience
At the weekend my husband and I decided to go shopping for a new bed.
As we drove down Condamine Road in Sydney, we saw a plethora of bed retailers selling at knock down prices.
Great we thought as we parked the car and decided to check out a couple of places. We visited Sleep City, Captain Snooze and Harvey Norman and had a fairly typical customer experience in two of the three places.
Our experience was a little different in the third place. There was just one sales assistant working the floor, so we had time to lie down on a few beds and figure out what we wanted — rather than being followed around with the sales spiel for each mattress as we had experienced in the other two places.
Eventually a kindly sixty-something lady wandered over and introduced herself to us. She was genuinely interested in us and in finding us the right mattress for our needs and price range.
She asked us our names and spent time chatting to us about our lives and where we came from. She was very friendly and non-pushy, so we asked her name and said we would think about it over night and return the next day.
We did come back the next day to find this sales assistant and make the purchase. But before we filled out the paperwork, I disappeared off to the bathroom leaving my husband and the lady to small talk.
When I returned I saw my husband standing rigid and looking very uncomfortable. Apparently she had said to him: “I’m not a racist” — ugh-o, here it comes — “but more people like you and your wife should be moving here” (i.e. Caucasians). She continued: “There are far too many immigrants coming from Vietnam — and not the good sort either.”
By the time I re-joined my husband her tirade was in full swing. “Australia used to be a beautiful country”, she said, “and now we are becoming like America and they’re not a very beautiful race, they’re all big teeth and fat.”
“Fat?” My husband eventually managed to counter. “What about country NSW?”
“Ah, there is no place in the world like country NSW is there?” she answered wistfully.
Where to from here? My husband and I made the sale and left the store feeling dumbfounded and rather embarrassed. “I enjoyed serving you,” she shouted after us, which of course made us feel even worse.
Perhaps I should have said: “Actually my sister-in-law is Cantonese” or “Actually we both love experiencing different cultures” or my husband could have pointed out that his whole team at work is multi-cultural, and highly skilled at that.
Or maybe I should have said that, like America, our country is built on immigration. We are all immigrants and we will depend on more people arriving to keep us relevant and influential on a world stage, and to keep our economy booming.
What’s more we also don’t exactly have an open-door policy. Australia’s immigration laws are some of the toughest in the world, and they are based not on race, but on the ability to offer the right skills.
At the end of the day, her attitudes just come from ignorance. But what I find really incredible is that she chose to share them with us when she didn’t know us from a bar of soap, and in her workplace too!
Somehow I don’t think this will be good for business. We won’t be back.
