Customer Is Last in Germany

BERLIN â€”  When in the course of human events it becomes necessary at 8 o’clock in the German night to score a quart of milk . . . or a bottle of cough medicine . . . or a box of diapers . . . or some vanilla extract . . .

Kein Weg (No way), Jose!

Shopkeepers in this rich nation of 82 million don’t stay open past 6:30 on most weekday evenings. They don’t do business past 1:30 on most Saturday afternoons. German commercial districts are graveyards on Sundays: No one turns a single mark except gas stations, florists and, curiously, bakeries. These may open for two hours to sell cakes and pastries--but they can’t sell bread.

Such is the law laid down by the German government in 1956 to try to protect workers from predatory bosses.

Recessions have come, recessions have gone, unemployment has ebbed and surged, but the rules remain in force. The only relaxation came in 1989, when shopkeepers won the option to stay open until 8:30 p.m. on Thursdays. In exchange for having to work two extra hours per week, sales staffs were guaranteed a 55% overtime premium.

Now, recession is pressing hard once again. Unemployment is higher than at any time since the end of World War II. Consumers, fearful for their jobs, are reining in spending, so retail sales have fallen 2% in the last year. Chancellor Helmut Kohl says job creation is his top priority, but with the official jobless rate at 11% and rising--and the decision-making elite stymied about how to reverse the trend--the fear here is that, perhaps, the German “economic miracle� is over.

What to do? To those who base their prescriptions on orthodox economics, the answer seems glaring: Open the stores. Extend the hours of doing business. Nurture a service sector. Make it easy and pleasant for people to buy things, and watch the jobs appear.

But to those who base their predictions on a knowledge of the German psyche, these innovations won’t come to pass soon.

“Everybody is talking about having more services in Germany, but nobody understands why it is impossible to get a service sector functioning,� says Geert Mueller-Gerbes, moderator of a popular consumer-advocacy television show. “It’s connected with our history. People in this country have a very complicated attitude toward ‘service.’ �

Indeed, in this land of top-flight luxury cars and world-class industrial engineering, the service sector is still in the horse-and-buggy age. Germany relies on manufacturing for a higher proportion of its jobs than any other country in the industrialized world. Almost 72% of Americans toil in the service sector; in Germany, just 58% do.

Not for nothing did Germans name shopping, in one recent survey, as the No. 4 cause of stress in their lives--ahead of personal relationships, children and bosses. With retail establishments open for precious few hours a day, everyone is forced to funnel through shops at the same time, turning supermarkets and department stores into veritable demolition derbies of crashing carts and shoving customers.

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Even cash-carrying tourists catch little slack, especially on Sundays: Though their hotels provide some services, the nearby boutiques that shoppers fancy and the souvenir stands are shut by German law.

Then there are the surly clerks. Hilmar Kopper, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest, once estimated that “if only employees would get into the habit of greeting customers nicely when they see them,� domestic output could grow by 25%.

The statute that dictates when Germans may buy their bread and milk is just one stricture making consumer life difficult and, arguably, hampering job creation just when this country needs it most. Other relics still observed include:

* The Law Against Unfair Competition, circa 1909, which makes it a crime to put goods on sale for all but four weeks of the year.

* The Discount Law of 1933, which limits the percentage by which stores may mark down items for sale.

* The Bonus Regulation of 1932, which forbids businesses from offering such standard premiums as the bottomless cup of coffee or the credit-card frequent-flier tie-in.

* The Overnight Baking Law, which sees to it that no bakery can fire up its ovens before 4 a.m.

The “store-closing law� alone has certainly done as much as any “glass ceiling� to keep women at home and in their kitchens. A wife and mother simply can’t take on the kind of work hours her husband does; if she tries, no one in the house will be free during shopping hours to buy the family food. Not surprisingly, only 1% of Germany’s senior managers are women, a fifth the American level.

But archaic retailing laws cannot be blamed for everything that’s awry in the German economy. Take market express lanes. There is no law against them in the federal republic--yet almost no grocery offers one. Even East Germany, hardly a shopper’s paradise, had market express lanes; but when the former East merged with the West, they mysteriously disappeared.

For his explanations of the German service culture--or lack thereof--TV moderator Mueller-Gerbes turns to history. His show--its name translates as “What?!?�--has become a surprise cult favorite, delighting about 5 million viewers each Saturday night with dramatizations of real-life service-sector horror stories. Mueller-Gerbes says he gets 8,000 letters a month--almost three times the mail for the chancellor.

As Mueller-Gerbes sees it, Germany’s existence as a postwar parliamentary democracy is relatively brief--not long enough, he says, to instill in its citizens a well-rooted self-confidence about their rights and responsibilities in modern society.

Authority-Worship

Instead, he thinks, prewar German history, with its succession of autocrats and dictators, has left a strong streak of authority-worship that influences the way salesclerks behave even today.

“A lot of people still think a king is something wonderful,� he says. “Nobody has to take things as his own responsibility. Everybody is just following orders.�

Thus, the experience of Hans-Joerg Velewald, a reporter for the newsmagazine Der Spiegel who was at a restaurant one day, trying to buy a small cup of coffee to go. The restaurant offered large and small cups of coffee to customers who wanted to sit down. But for the carry-out crowd, only large cups were available.

Velewald grumbled; the waiter made no apology. Nor, when pressed, did he concede that the policy forced Velewald to spend extra money. He simply fell back on a higher authority: “He told me it was written in the German Constitution to sell only large cups of coffee, not small ones,� Velewald says.

Compounding the instinct to dodge consumer grievances by blaming a higher authority or a law, Mueller-Gerbes adds, is a generalized sense that in a modern democracy it is archaic, even demeaning, to work a service job.

“People think that ‘to serve’ is not proper for a human being,� he says. “It’s a mentality. This is the reason it’s so difficult to create a service culture.�

At Your Service?

Sigrid Hehn, who runs a property maintenance firm in western Germany, found out what can result when a customer tries to pressure a service provider to provide . . . service.

The German phone company--Deutsche Telekom--had mixed up her home number with that of a woman who runs a sex-chat line. As many as 30 times a day, men called Hehn and zealously asked to speak with “Tina.�

Hehn asked Telekom for help. One clerk shooed her away with the chestnut “We’re checking the line.� Another claimed the problem involved the old analog circuits in the former East Germany--though Hehn lives near the French border, far to the west. Still another clerk insisted Hehn had no problem: People were just dialing lots of wrong numbers.

Finally, someone decided to tell her straight: “The head of management told me, ‘Frau Hehn, we are not in the mood to work on your problem anymore,’ � Hehn recalls.

But she persisted. Nine months went by before it finally dawned on anybody at Telekom to assign her a new number. While she waited for a technician to hook it up, Hehn got the idea of withholding one month’s basic service fee from her bill.

“I thought that by withholding money, I could put pressure on them,� she says.

Bad move! When Telekom found out that Hehn had “unfortunately taken a legal route� instead of accepting its “generous proposal� of a new number, it withdrew the offer. It was nearly a year before she finally got her new line.

Those trying to promote a consumer-friendly service sector say there is big resistance, not only from labor unions but from retailers. Shopkeepers don’t believe longer hours will help them sell more goods; they suspect any change will empower the big chain stores and drive little guys out of business.

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Hubertus Tessar, manager of the Central Assn. of German Retailers, says 80% of his members want to preserve the status quo, “and there is a total understanding with the [retailing] union.�

But such resistance may be crumbling. Here and there, individual entrepreneurs are discovering that by helping the consumer they can raise their bottom line--even if that means bending some rules.

In big cities, some Turkish cafes are turning their storerooms into illicit, after-hours grocery stores, and finding that the authorities often look the other way. Some furniture and appliance stores have begun opening their doors on Sunday--not to sell tables or take orders but to give customers an extra few hours to browse.

Gas stations are emerging as a great vanguard of consumerist reform. Since they fit through a loophole in the shop-closing laws that permits the selling of “travel necessities� after 6:30 p.m., they have taken to defining “travel necessities� as everything from champagne to laundry detergent; they offer these after hours at a handsome markup.

Some optimists even think the 1956 shop-closing law soon may give way. Already, there are a few minor exceptions, such as the “longer Saturday�: Once a month in summer, stores may stay open until 4 p.m.. In winter, they may stay open until 6 p.m. once a month.

Despite the small moves toward reform, resistance to change comes not just from the retailers and clerks unions but also from many ordinary Germans. People here look to America’s famously buoyant service economy and see not a consumer paradise where unemployment is low but a workers’ hell, where tens of thousands can be put on the street and where frazzled single mothers must run cash registers at all-night markets for the minimum wage.

“The creation of a service sector will lead to new problems in Germany,� warns Velewald--he of the unavailable small coffee to go.

He speaks for many when he says he hopes Germany can find a happy middle ground between America’s ruthless economy and the state of affairs here.

Dirk Foehrs’ Furniture

Consider the case of Dirk Foehrs, who ordered a dining room table, six black leather chairs and a bed from his local “ready-to-go� furniture store in western Germany. “Ready-to-go,� in this case, meant the furniture would be ready to be picked up in six to eight weeks.

Foehrs rented a van on the appointed day and motored to the store. He bounced around from warehouse to warehouse because no one could find his order. Finally, the boxes appeared and Foehrs took them home. However, he discovered that the tabletop was gouged, one of the black leather chairs had a brown piece sewn in it and the bed couldn’t be put together because it had neither screws nor pre-bored holes.

When Foehrs called the store, they suggested he bring everything back. But by that time he already had returned the van. The store promised to send someone out. Two months went by and no one came.

Finally, Foehrs contacted a lawyer. That prompted the store to send out a young man who clucked sympathetically over the furniture and said he would like to help but could not, Foehrs recalls, “because he wasn’t allowed to do anything without an order.�

Foehrs and his lawyer wrote more letters, and eventually the store sent back the young man, this time with an older one who scolded Foehrs for shopping at a downscale outlet: “If you want something special, you should buy a Mercedes, not a Volkswagen.�

But Foehrs insisted that no matter where he shopped, he at least deserved to get six black leather chairs with no brown pieces of leather slyly sewn in. So the two men fixed the offending chair: They spray-painted the brown part, then departed.