We are moving into our new flat where we will stay for a year on Friday. The flat is unfurnished, so we have had to go shopping a lot. Hurraay! many will say, but in reality it is quite a hard job if you have to find things and quickly. Our first experience that I have also blogged about, was at the Sleep Country Canada and this is still the best experience we have had so far. The rest of the experiences have been so-so to say the least. People are usually very nice when you get to talk to them, but we have had difficulties in getting someone to come and talk to us to begin with. In one of the biggest department store’s in Calgary – The Hudson Bay – we had to chase down people to ask them for prices. Yes, because prices were not on the shelves or on the products and that made it really difficult to make up our minds. Once we got people’s attention they were helpful and tried to suggest things and some suggestions we were very grateful for. But if we had not done the chasing, we could have left without even talking to anyone. If you think that the store was full of people, then no, it wasn’t.

Another bad experience was at Staples – I tried to get sales staff attention, but they were very focused on what they were doing, I went and asked the cashier to page down someone to the furniture section and when the person came I could definitely sense from his attitude that I was keeping him from something more important.

This reminds me a lot of Europe and especially Estonia in the good old boom days – when very often people thought that they are paid to show up and the rest is not really their problem. If someone tried to make it their problem, they could walk out and on to some other job where the pay is higher and job less demanding. Calgary is experiencing the same problem at the moment.  It is not universal – there are a lot of good people who care about what they are doing, but unfortunately many who really do not.