on closer examination...

Cultural differences abound, everywhere, and I try to be conscious of my U.S.A.-centric baseline, principally when it comes to what I’ll call overall rationality of daily living. On an objective scale, I am convinced that certain aspects of Argentine society simply make no sense, and, with that, dear reader, I shall now unabashedly launch into an overly biased tirade regarding the insanity of Argentine customer service and other sundry irrationalities.

Previously in this forum, I have addressed the most notable inconvenience – the mierda de las monedas. Reconnaissance indicates that the necessity of paying busses in coins, which nobody wants to give you, is a nagging inconvenience due to the bus mafia: the bus companies sell the change for more than face value to black market middlemen who push the coinage back into the market. Today I saw a sign on the front of an ice cream store: “Free kilogram of ice cream after payment of 100 pesos in change.” A kilo goes for about 36 pesos.

However, I am perhaps equally as dumbfounded by the utterly inexplicable lack of change in all but the highest-end retail establishments. We’re not talking loose coins here, we are talking enough bills to make more than a few dollars worth of change for ordinary purchases. For example, in the late afternoon, I went to the post office, a government entity (which, admittedly, probably makes it less likely that they would be fiscally organized, but nonetheless) and sent a few letters. The bill came to twenty-nine pesos (~u$s 8.50), and I paid with a 50 peso note (~u$s15). Cashier #5 (of 6) asked me if I had anything smaller. I answered that I did not (I lied, since it was eminently reasonable to pay with a fifty, and I needed to get rid of that bill when the payment proportion was reasonable, as it is very infrequent that I make any purchase of over twenty pesos). Cashier #5 nodded and left her desk, and returned shortly thereafter to ask me if I was sure that I did not have anything smaller. I repeated my previous (false) statement. (What was I going to do, pay her with all my small bills and then have to buy my seven-peso vegetables with a 50??). After interrupting each of the lower-numbered cashiers to request change, cashier #5 returned with twenty-one pesos.

Now, I cannot comprehend how Cashier #5 could not have had twenty-one pesos to give me. My bill, for a very pedestrian international shipment, was twenty-nine pesos. Surely in the six previous hours, during which time there was a constant twenty minute wait for (mediocre) service, this cashier (indeed, each and every one of them) must have received twenty-one pesos in payment. It would astound me if she had not received several hundred pesos in payment. I myself was paying her twenty-nine pesos, all at once!

Sadly, the lack of change is nothing new to Argentina; all of Latin America suffers from this profound and mysterious affliction. Over the course of a day, the money received by cashiers unfailingly disappears, and with truly devastating rapidity. In my experience, the most absurd episodes of this baffling phenomenon take place in Peru, where small women scurry to the next-door store any time the patron pays with more than two dollars. Nonetheless, the Argentine version of this insidious spectacle is impressive for the part it plays in the country’s already singular culture of customer service; that is to say, lack thereof. The nearest chain-grocery store to my house, the Leader Price, never fails to have exactly one (generally unenthusiastic) cashier working at peak hours, leaving the other four checkout lanes to rest easy. Thus, one can always expect a lengthy wait, exasperation which is, of course, exacerbated by the common cashier practice of calling the manager in order to get change for a 50. (The closest American approximation of the experience waiting in a typical argentine check-out line is the Giant Grocery store at 8th and O in Washington, DC - it’s the one with the police tape out front. I regularly brought my 20-pound law textbooks to the grocery store to head-off certain checkout idleness).

Indifferent, lax, and downright rude customer service is rampant in Argentina – indeed, that attitude represents the leading half of a sub-par service sector dance, working in tandem with dissatisfied but complacent clientele. No customer complains, because everybody knows that complaining will get you nowhere; no employee heeds customer complaints, because workers aren’t used to hearing complaints and have no qualms about screwing the occasional dissident. I write this not to complain (though I’ll admit plainly that I have played the part of the screwed dissident customer on various occasions), but simply to point out what I see as a real cultural difference between Argentina (and other Latin countries) and the United States; Argentines generally tolerate less – and thus, they get less, they don’t tip, and they neither complain nor commend the service on appropriate occasions. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, and me, well, I too often end up cracked and broiled.

My next favorite Argentine irrationality is a new one, historically. Argentina is in a single time zone, Argentine Standard Time (Argentina would never tolerate being in someone else’s zone), which coincides with Brazil, even though Brazil is located almost entirely to the east of Argentina, and the countries directly north of Argentina (Bolivia, Paraguay, sharing the same longitude) are an hour later. You can travel north and change time zones. Now, the country is not wide enough for it to be absurd that there is only one time zone (indeed, it spans fewer degrees of longitude than the U.S. Eastern Time Zone), and Argentines have indicated to me in any case it would be “crazy for the same country to be on different time zones” (granted, on other occasions, Argentines have insisted to me, among other things, that Niagara Falls was man-made). It would make no sense, the reasoning goes, for me in Buenos Aires to call my friend in Salta, in the west, and have it be a different time there than it is here. How would you ever know what time it is there??!!

Since last December, there is a new twist to the time zone tango: Daylight Savings Time. This year, on October 19, clocks sprung forward one hour in exactly 10 of Argentina’s 23 provinces. Thus, rather than having actual time zones, whereby different longitudinal zones are constantly 1 hour apart for the entire year (which, recall, would be crazy), there are now 10 distinct and geographically disparate provinces which are one hour different from the others, for one half of the year. The rest of the year, all provinces are on the same time. The lunacy of this situation requires no further explication.