I think the thing that’s given me the biggest up close and personal uncomfortable culture shock so far has been shopping for pants. I didn’t bring any pants with me, because this is the Philippines. But pants are more appropriate for work environments here than some of the other things I brought, so I set out to buy some.
First of all, it was a challenge to find my size, first of all because I’m built bigger than what is fashionable for young Filipino women, and secondly because I wasn’t sure how my pant size translated into the Filipino size listings. Normally when I browse for clothes, I like to take my time evaluating style and price, and it would take me even longer this time as I’d have to figure out my size by trial and error and eyeing the pants to see if it looked like it might fit me. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to deliberate, because the many employees that I’ve mentioned in a previous post swarmed me. They asked me to sit down, tell them my size, and describe what I wanted so they could go find it for me. Of course I had to explain that I wasn’t sure what size I was, but I told them I was looking for pants in light colors to match the other clothes I brought with me.
What ensued was a lot of awkwardness – at least that’s how I perceived it on my end. The salespeople were just passing me pants to try on, and once I found a size that fit, they just started handing me any pants that size and insisting that I try them on, even if it wasn’t what I was looking for. It felt very uncomfortable to look at the prices of the things they were handing me and knowing that it was more than I’d want to spend, but I’d feel obligated to try things on anyway since they were going to so much trouble, even if I knew I wouldn’t buy them.
Eventually, it became clear that the section I was in didn’t have any pants that matched what I was looking for in my size, and this was very difficult to grapple with. As I’ve mentioned before, store employees are employed by the brand, not the store. So I had to go to a different brand section without buying anything from the employees I had previously been dealing with. I felt so guilty, like I was betraying them after they had tried to be so helpful.
In some ways, you get better service in this set-up, because employees are motivated to keep you in their section and make you buy from their brand, and there’s always an employee close at hand. In other ways though, I vastly prefer the way stores back home operate, because an employee (once you find one to help you) can help you find clothing items you’re looking for anywhere they have them in the store. Here, if you ask an employee to find something for you and they don’t have it in their brand, they’ll try to offer you something totally different instead, and it’s uncomfortable trying to walk away from the over-attentive employees in one section to go look in another. By the end of this experience, I was clutching a pair of pants and trying to get back to the escalator to buy them while hiding from all the employees I’d dealt with previously so they wouldn’t see me leaving and buying something from a different brand.