Shopping and some other Hofstede concepts.

 As I was sick on the day of last week's class, I am gonna try to talk about some of the concepts we have to talk about today without relying on the class discussions but to start things off, in today's lesson, a couple of things(completely unrelated if you ask me) were talked about, and mainly it is about how you expect staff to treat you when you go shopping and masculinity and femininity. 

To start things off, for me personally I always like to be nice to service workers so whenever I enter a store I'll smile and either say a greeting or not but definitely smile, and naturally I expect to well, have good service from service workers but I feel like it should be a two way relationship where you be nice to someone and they in turn will be nice to you.   

Additionally, I do expect the staff members to either know where things are or be able to explain a product if I ask them about it, if they can't do either of those 2 things I get the impression that either they are a newer worker or they don't care about their jobs(I don't blame them service jobs suck) which can make things a bit harder for me as a customer.

Also, I do enjoy being treated in a friendly way rather than being treated as royalty unless being treated as royalty is part of what I paid for but that doesn't usually happen, I don't expect a department store worker to treat me like I am a lord of a manor or something like that because I feel like that is too degrading of them.

Furthermore, I wanted to talk about how different shops here are in Japan compared to where I have lived before, for starters we do not have anything as convenient as a konbini in the Middle East, we either have big supermarkets or just small markets and the small markets aren't gonna have anything crazy, just some drinks snacks and the likes, the ready made foods you will see in both supermarkets and konbinis here in Japan also aren't really a thing from my experience in the Middle East.
I have lived 2 years in Malaysia as well and although we do have konbinis(family mart and 7/11 for example!) their quality is subpar compared to the ones in Japan although I gotta say Malaysian konbinis do have soft serve ice cream whereas Japan doesn't which is kind of surprising.

 

Lastly, I have to talk about masculinity and femininity and that has nothing to do with shopping at all if you ask me but I digress.

Masculinity and femininity are both social constructs in the sense that it depends on a society to determine what it thinks is masculine and what it thinks of feminine, for example mostly any country in the world will tell you skirts are feminine but if you ask a Scottish person about it they may tell you otherwise because men's national clothing there has a skirt. Ear piercings and the likes will also similarly be seen as feminine things in many parts of the world but I have see men in China rock with some pretty cool ear piercings and it has given me a different perspective.