[Mediterraneo10]

It is strange that this article sees Finland as an odd man out in terms of customer-service interactions, and it suggests the USA or the UK is the norm. I have lived in both southern Europe (where people are claimed to be more extrovert) and in Finland, and generally interacting with a "barista" or cashier in both places is exactly the same, consisting of only the words "Hello" and "Thanks". In the USA one might get small talk coming from employees who don’t know you, but that tends to be feigned and is therefore rather creepy.

[klodolph]

Some things are universal but a shopkeeper making smalltalk is not creepy in the US, even if it is in other countries. It's a cultural thing.

One of the benefits of smalltalk in shops is that if you have a question you don't have to interrupt anybody. You're already having a conversation with a clerk so you might as well ask a question about the merchandise. I don't have to get anybody's attention. I'm not advocating for small talk here but merely trying to explain that it is not without benefits.

The idea that smalltalk is "feigned" doesn't make sense to me, I'm not sure how that word could be applied here. To give some context, in the US there are definitely two different types of smiles. One type of smile expresses happiness and another type of smile is used for polite social interactions. These expressions don't look similar and you wouldn't confuse the two, at least instinctually. Your instinctual response to a polite smile (amygdala) will recognize that it does not express happiness, but if your higher thought processes (visual cortex) think it expresses happiness then the mismatch will make you feel uneasy. If you think of the polite smile as feigned happiness, it seems insincere, but it is not feigned happiness... it is sincere politeness. If you are from a culture that does not smile to strangers it will naturally seem insincere to you unless you get used to it.

[Mediterraneo10]

> The idea that smalltalk is "feigned" doesn't make sense to me

Ever talk to an American waiter about this? Often they will complain about their customers and how much they hate them, but they still have to be smiley and make small talk because 1) they feel they won’t get tips without it, and 2) their bosses insist on it.

[klodolph]

I've been living in the US for almost all of my life, various regions, and I still don't see how small talk is "feigned". (I am curious what your social background is, and what your experience is with US culture.) The construction does not even make sense to me, and the phrase seems logically impossible to me, so my guess is that we are using different definitions for "feigned" or "small talk" or some other term.

"To feign" means to do something in a way that it looks like you're doing something else, so I could feign that I care about you and care about your well-being, but secretly I don't care about you and I hate you. However, small talk is not this. Small talk is just polite conversation that does not cover any issues of real relevance but merely demonstrates friendly intentions or a desire for positive interactions. So when I say, "How are you?", if this is small talk, I am not actually feigning interest. We both understand that I am not actually expressing any interest in your well being, I am only trying to communicate that I want to have a positive interaction with you. In Linguistics this phenomenon is called "pragmatics", and it is the phenomenon that the actual meaning of an utterance can be completely different from its literal meaning. Another example of pragmatics is "Do you have a pen?" This is literally a question of fact, but most likely it is a request to borrow a pen. Someone saying "Do you have a pen?" is not feigning interest in whether you have a pen any more than someone saying "How are you doing today?" is feigning interest in your well being. If you ask me, "Do you have a pen?" and I reply, "Yes," with no further comment or action I'm being rude, just as I would be rude if a sales clerk asked me, "How are you doing today?" and I started rambling about my upcoming divorce and how my mother was recently diagnosed with cancer.

That's not to say waiters don't feign interest or feign happiness. Yes, many people in the service industry are required to "perform" or express certain attitudes. This can be emotionally draining. Small talk is not this; small talk is genuine and it does not express interest or emotion. "Feigned" small talk doesn't make sense logically.

If you think it is creepy then you are applying standards from another culture to our own. You have every right to make these judgments but I don't see a case here for the supremacy of one single culture's interpretation of small talk.

[andyroid]

If your interest in my well being does not include listening to me talking about my illness for the next twenty minutes, your interest is feigned. This is what it’s all about in countries that don’t bother much with small talk, and your example with asking about someone owning a pen (while interesting in other aspects) isn’t really a serviceable metaphor to that.

[klodolph]

There's no feigned interest, if you think I have expressed interested in you talking about your illness for the next twenty minutes then you have literally misunderstood what I said. I can sympathize with people who find this confusing—the meaning of the question “How are you doing today?” cannot be deduced from structure. I have known people who are native English speakers who grew up in the US and find this deduction difficult—they have to ask for clarification. I have an autistic friend who does this regularly, but she does not accuse people of being insincere.

The example of a pen is not a metaphor. It is another example of the underlying linguistic phenomenon (pragmatics) in action. Just like the meaning of “Do you have a pen?” cannot be deduced from its structure, the meaning of “How are you doing today?” cannot be deduced from its structure. You are required to use context in both cases, and for the same reason. I am not sure why you are calling it a metaphor, since I literally described it as "another example of pragmatics". It is not a similar phenomenon, it is literally the same phenomenon in action.

If you wish to learn more about pragmatics, there are many resources on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics

If you interpret small talk as "feigned interest", then you are in error.

[bluetomcat]

Customer-service interactions as they are in the US are not popular and are considered obtrusive even in more extrovert cultures such as southern and eastern Europe. Small talk there generally takes place between colleagues and friends.

[redblacktree]

As a customer, I'm not exactly interested in small talk, and I know that the service person isn't either, but I walk a fine line. Because I care about people as people, I want get the message across, "I see you. I know you're a real person and not a robot. Thank you for being here to help me get my lunch today." I think non-verbal communication goes a long way with this. (for the opposite effect, I see people order without so much as looking at the service person) In any case, it's important to me that people aren't treated as robots or less-than because of the job they're doing.

[Bartweiss]

Years ago, someone pointed out to me that we tend to hustle through courtesy interactions faster than we really need to, which leads to tropes like "Have a nice flight!" "You too!" Since then, I've made an effort to reduce the number of those interactions, but spend a bit more focus on them. I've been surprised - consciously considering what I mean when I say 'thank you' apparently changes the delivery enough that people react visibly differently to it.

(It's tougher with phone calls, especially when some customer service rep is clearly being recorded and under orders to follow a script; I don't really know what to do there except explicitly say "I know this isn't your fault and you don't have a choice, but I don't want any of what you're offering.")

[QuantumGood]

Real sincerity is easily communicated via eye contact. Trying to seem sincere when not actually meaning is usually a voice tone/verbal strategy.

[Mediterraneo10]

> I want get the message across, "I see you. I know you're a real person and not a robot.

Thank goodness for self-service checkouts these days where we don’t have to be bothered to get that message across, though.

[redblacktree]

Yeah, agreed. We've got to figure out the humanitarian side with basic income or something else, but those kinds of jobs are a waste of life. Let them do literally anything else.

[drb91]

Hell they’re even creepy and draining in the US.

If you work in retail, you can see middle age white women get away with behavior (entitlement, rage, abuse) that would normally get cops called were they a different person. Customer service in the US is just straight broken.

[Bartweiss]

I think the other side of this is that using the USA as the far end of the scale is a mistake. A quick trip through much of Latin America, or for that matter the US Midwest, makes clear that the UK and coastal USA still do quite a bit less talking to strangers than other cultures. And by that standard, the stereotypically extroverted parts of Europe (e.g. Italy) are downright reserved.

For some reason, I do find the US standard more facile than either of the poles. Taciturn cultures like the Finns have obvious authenticity because people talk for reasons, but very high interaction cultures have their own sort of sincerity: people talking idly because they're enjoying the act of conversation. Trading a few sentences as pure courtesy misses both marks, and often feels more draining than a much longer conversation.

(Now I wonder if this is tied to US tipping and sales cultures, since "act blandly nice" becomes an important transaction for a lot of people. Obviously it's not the whole story, but I do find even UK conversation rather different than the US pattern.)

[mseidl]

I'm a German that lived in the USA for a while, and now that I'm back, at first the customer service was pretty bad in Germany. But I like it now. It can be pretty bad where you might have to beg the sales guy to take your money, but not being bombarded by sales people or way too much bs talking. When I was back in the US, I rented a car, and I didn't really say anything much just answered her questions, I didn't solicit any small talk but she wouldn't shut up about her life. It's like "just give me the car!!!"

[jaclaz]

I guess it depends, I worked a short bit of time in Berlin (construction project) and among other things I was somehow the "procurement guy" even if my German is far from being good enough (we had a couple interpreters anyway).

I remember distinctly some "queer" conversations with suppliers, we had German engineers and of course approved and compliant to norms projects, in other countries if you called a hardware supplier asking for (say) 1000 hex bolts, 16 mm (M16) diameter, 100 mm long, class 8.8 grade, zinc, nach DIN 931, they would simply state if they had them available and how much they would cost, while in Germany there was always the question "What are you going to use them for?".

They were ( mind you I appreciated it, even if sometimes it was excessive) wanting to make sure that we were asking the "right" product for the intended use, and in many cases (that was waay too many years ago) we had to fax them parts of the projects so that they could make sure before even telling us if they could provide the goods.

[dragonwriter]

> It is strange that this article sees Finland as an odd man out in terms of customer-service interactions, and it suggests the USA or the UK is the norm

It's not really odd at all that an article that is part of a BBC Travel series treats the UK as the baseline norm.