At lunch today, I bought a new set of headphones from PixDix for 50,000 won (approx. $50). They were from a reputable brand and had good reviews online. Upon trying them out, however, I found that the sound quality was terrible. It's hard to know if the problem is endemic to these headphones or if I just got a bad pair. Either way, I wanted to exchange them.
This is where the problems start. On the back of my PixDix receipt it states that I have 14 days to make returns or exchanges. I went back to PixDix about six hours after buying the headphones. And they refused to do anything buy smile mockingly and laugh a bit. No exchanges on opened items, the clerk told me. That seems to include items that are defective.
Buyer beware. Do not shop at PixDix.
I'm surprised you have such a positive overall impression of Korean customer service. I lived in Korea for eight years and loved it, but not because of the way I was treated as a customer. At the cash register or the service desk, rudeness and polite inflexibility are the norm. Notable exception: make friends with the ajumma/ajeossi whose restaurant you frequent, show her/him you can speak more than pidgin Korean and that you're interested in the culture, and you've got an ally for life.
ReplyDeleteKoreans thrive on the personalization of relationships: if they don't know you, they have no problem leaving you bleeding and dying on the street, but if they do know you, they'll move heaven and earth for you. That's why customer service normally sucks in Korea: there's no ethos of "civitas," and just about every customer is, from the cashier's/owner's point of view, a stranger.
My take as a half-Korean and ex-Seoulite, anyway.
I think there's a sharp distinction between an ordinary restaurant and some place nicer, and I think we all know the difference. The former is staffed by middle-aged women of any appearance, the latter has shiny floors, metallic surfaces and the employees are thin, young women with tightly-bound hair.
ReplyDeleteService in a seafood restaurant, then, is very different from service at a bank. I think Westerners are impressed easily by the formality of the service because even if it's useless, the formality is a bit more pleasant than the sort of casual treatment you get back home.
Several years ago I bought an iRiver MP3 player from a Lotte Mart in Gimhae; it was in fact defective out of the box, but they would not give me a refund- they told me to take it to iRiver's service center 45 minutes away in Busan. So f*** Lotte as well.
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