Prior to moving out to the Philippines, I made extensive use of on-line shopping including eBay, the Canon UK refurbished items site Ocado, Tesco and Sainsbury’s online for groceries and of course Amazon. I mention this for a number of reasons, not least of which is to illustrate that I didn’t actually visit retail establishments to do my shopping as much as I do now, that and there is also more of a shopping mall culture here than here, the closest I came to that was visiting Guildford town centre or scarily Bicester Village (which I did for work not pleasure).
It should be said that in the hotels and catering industries here, the customer service is generally of a very high standard, with staff looking after the customers and ensuring they are well looked after. This however does not necessarily carry over into other retail outlets, I shall cite some examples of what I mean:-
- If you can’t find something and ask the staff whether they have it, the answer is often “out of stock” and that is all that they say.
- When an item is out of stock, my next question is normally “when do you expect it to be in stock?” which is often met with a blank look, prompting the follow up of “have you ordered any?” which is also met with a blank look as if I had asked for something impossible or unusual.
- On some occasions I have been informed that although there is no stock in this particular branch, there might be elsewhere, finding out if this is the case can be problematic, asking for it to be shipped to where I am is like getting blood from a stone, although to be fair, National Bookstore did get a book for me from a store 40km away, but it took 3 weeks.
- Recently we saw the launch of two new cellphones (4 in the end to be accurate) the Apple iPhone 6 (and the 6+) and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 (and the Note Edge). I visited several allied resellers for both brands to enquire about release dates and prices in the Philippines as I was interested in buying one or the other of these and even as close as 10 days prior to the local launch this information was not available to the staff in the shops; this was even more annoying when the information was available for the Galaxy Note phones on the Samsung.ph website, why don’t they cascade this information????
I earlier mentioned online shopping, something I used to do a lot in the UK, but not so much here due to the difficulty in paying for things or enquiring whether a particular item is in stock (common thread here??). Many companies do have an online presence here, however their websites are often just a single page, or if they do show more, there is a shortage of information. For example, one of the major appliance retailers has a site which doesn’t even include much more than a thumbnail picture and a price, there are no further details on the specification, size or other useful facts about the item.
- Many sites have an enquiry email address, however having used several, I have found the majority not to be monitored (I think of the 18 or 20, only 2 have responded), any questions sent to the info@xyz.com or enquiries@xyz.com mailboxes often go unanswered, which doesn’t instill any confidence in the website.
- I recently tried to take out a contract for an upmarket phone using one of the 3 main player’s website to enter my details, having completed the entry of information I was presented with a pop-up promising a contact from them in 24 to 48 hours. Some 4 days later, I had heard nothing; to keep a long and complex story short, I visited one of their shops some 10 days later and was informed that using the web portal was frankly a waste of time, we then started the process making use of a paper application form all over again.
- There is a lack of secure online payment methods here in the Philippines, I am not sure why this is, since Visa and Mastercard are associated with most of the debit and credit cards issued here. The preferred method for payment is for the customer to be provided with the vendor’s bank details and then to visit a branch of said bank and deposit either cash or a cheque for the full amount (and also pay any fees for the privilege) taking the deposit slip, scanning this and then emailing (or MMSing) it to the vendor to demonstrate payment has been made, cash on delivery is also sometimes available. Direct bank to bank transfers, whilst possible are not the norm despite the relative convenience this would offer.
Kat and I have been in our new house now for something over 6 months, at the time of writing this, we are still getting our electrical supply via a jury rigged connection from the back of the swimming pool filter room, as this is the most stable supply available and we specifically asked for a clean supply due to the number of AC units and the fridge all being inverter powered and therefore a bit sensitive to current fluctuations. We have been looking forward to having a proper supply, so imagine our delight when the local distributor installed power lines and poles around our house. However, it's not that simple, a whole bunch of documents need to be provided not only to the distributor, but also to city hall before we can get our supply connected. It turned out that we needed a number of building permits (water, electrical and construction), none of which had been even applied for, and to get these the city engineer required 9 full sets of architects drawings, each of which needed to be signed in the original by both myself and Kat as well as the architect and construction engineer on all pages! Suffice it to say, we are still living with the temporary supply with no idea of when this may change.
Well, that's enough for now, we have another visit to the OB before the year end to see how the baby is coming along, but that apart there is nothing exciting to report.
