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Africa Insight: Customer multitasking
Posted by daveb on July 11th, 2008
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Compared to The West, one of the many cultural differences that we’ve noticed in Tanzania is the acceptance of ‘customer multitasking’. Whilst we recognise that organised queuing is a uniquely British pastime, in my opinion it is far preferable to the African equivalent in which the server invites everyone who approaches their counter to make their request, which are then processed in whatever order the server chooses.
I presume that the server believes his ‘customer multitasking’ to be a very efficient way of working; after all, no-one is queuing, thus everyone is being dealt with. Except that no-one is really being dealt with at all.
All I want to do is buy a stamp for this stupid postcard. I’m first in-line at the counter, but the clerk is proof-reading a form for the guy three-back in the pseudo-queue behind me…
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