Take Away Food Shop

On a few occasions in Dutch fast food shops I've felt annoyed and somewhat disturbed. Not just from the food being handled thoroughly by dirty bare hands in between handling money. I can live with that now, the deep fryer surely kills all the germs except the hardiest cockroach eggs. Dead bacteria bodies are probably digestible, and might contain a few molecules of nutrition.

No it's not that.
I enter to find the frozen foods on display under the counter.
I naturally get excited and start salivating to see the delicious frozen blocks of compounded animal matter.

Then I gaze at the overhead menu board, hoping to find something recognizably edible.

Meanwhile the shop assistant stares at me fixedly, apparently assuming I should know what I want before I enter, knowing that there are the same 12 items available as in every other takeaway food shop in the country. Frikandel, krokets, meat and onion ball, mexicaan etc. The assistant moves in front of me since I obviously couldn't find her. After a second or two she interrupts my reading with a Dutch 'Can I help you?'. I ignore her, to indicate that I don't speak Dutch and furthermore I am still deciding. So she interrupts more loudly in an irritable tone 'Hullo! Can I help you?'

I ignore her again and perhaps turn to a friend to see what she wants, which riles the assistant further. who tries to lock aggressive eyes with me.

In most civilized countries the shop assistant patiently waits for the customer to make up his mind. Wearing a pleasant, welcoming smile, with humble, downcast eye contact. In Japan they even utter something like 'Itta daki mas' which means something like 'Welcome to my shop'. The customer is more than king there, he is Emperor.

I used to be annoyed by this aggressively intrusive behavior, but as I thought about this Dutch peculiarity today, I realized it may happen because in Holland they insist on serving people in the order in which they enter the shop. So the assistant first needs to get your permission before she can move on to the next customer. If a customer is skipped they might verbally attack the assistant.

Like many cultural misunderstandings, what appears to be rudeness could possibly be a quaint form of politeness!

Another interesting feature of Dutch shop assistants is that they have a single threaded processor - they can only serve one customer at a time, even to the exclusion of answering a simple question like 'when do you close?'

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