Poor service standards
A year ago we were in the midst of preparations for the arrival of visitors for Cricket World Cup. That was a period of promises and among the promises that were made by the local CWC secretariat was one that had to do with offering a training programme for workers employed in those sub-sectors of the service sector that were expected to cater to the visitors.
The extent to which such a training programme was undertaken is unclear. Nor do we know anything about the number of hotel, restaurant, snackette and other related categories of workers who actually received such training. What we do know is that one year after CWC 2007 there is little evidence of any real gain from whatever training might have been offered. Workers in most of our restaurants, snackettes, hotels and guest houses still offer us an overbearing slovenliness that is passed off as service. They bring the full weight of their surliness, ill manners and an almost permanent condition of ill-temper to bear in engaging customers. Among low-end store attendants in the city the situation can often be even more trying.
Apart from the fact that they are manifestly ill-trained in the basic requisites of civility and politeness, one gets the impression that many of these workers are unpleasant simply because they do not like their jobs.
Part of the problem, of course, is that employers in the hotel and restaurant industry and the retail trade hire poorly qualified mostly young women in the first place. Since they have little by way of relevant qualifications they are hardly in a position to demand pay levels beyond the minimum wage and they receive no training beyond the functional instructions necessary to get the job done.
Few people make a fuss about poor quality of service these days. We have grown accustomed to – and in most cases accept, without murmur – low standards of service; and many businesses are only too happy to be in a position where they need not bother about training since the universality of low standards means that their own shortcomings are unlikely to affect their “bottom line” anyway.
The fact that there is no real evidence that the institutions that matter, including the businesses themselves and their umbrella organizations, are making a sustained effort to treat this chronic disease fills one with a mounting sense of despair particularly since it is painfully evident that unless we can raise our service standards to the minimum level that exists both in the Caribbean and in developed and other developing countries, the people who we look to to support the development of our country, people like tourists and potential investors, will always have their reservations about doing business with Guyana.
