Sour staff, poor quality, lack of attitude - why is service like this in Bulgaria? Especially against the backdrop of its proximity to Greece and Turkey. Ivaylo Noizi Tsvetkov looks for the reasons:
The Bulgarian understanding of service suffers from a special kind of dissociative disorder - it often "withdraws" from the basic requisites of this activity. And somehow it misunderstands that it owes basic respect - while it often swears that the client is "king", it does not accept the very concept and simple obligations to the consumer.
In its mental software, the concept of a do, ut des type transaction is somehow missing, i.e. - I give a service so that you reward me when you come back. At the same time, it does not make the causal connection between the work done and the reward itself.
Bulgarian service does not even understand the most important thing - that when it is of high quality, it leads to immeasurably more profits, if you look in the longer term or at least further than your nose. This is clear at a fundamental level in supposedly similar tourist cultures such as Greece and Turkey. No, it wants to get a quick 50 now and then, sour and with inflated prices, and not to earn 500 over time due to a sustainable model.
The middle class already has alternatives
Of course, I am far from the idea of generalizing and I am not talking only about the "Bulgarian tourist product", which is a complex and variable system. There is not only bad Bulgarian service, just as there is not only good Turkish, Croatian, etc. The problem has many dimensions, only one of which is "short-termism", i.e. the idea of "oh well, the season is short, they feed for a day, now we'll spare them, they come again, they don't come". Here I'm talking about both the staff and the entrepreneurs, but there is certainly a rudimentary relationship between them, which generally leads to a bad result.
And here immediately comes the basic cultural and economic problem - well, they, the tourists, and the customers in general, Bulgarian or not, have long gone wherever they want, depending on the economic level they are on. The Bulgarian service as a group psychology never understood that there is already a relatively large middle class and boldly continues to practice a lack of respect for the customer. No one looks to the future and does not draw experience from the more advanced - that customers are grown slowly and gracefully.
The reasons are historical, cultural, structural
The problems with the culture of service are far from just a cunning legacy from "Balkantourist". I would trace them back even to the Ottoman yoke, when the obligation to serve the aga combined with reactive domestic encapsulation and seemed to mark the beginning of today's concept of "I don't owe you anything to serve you".
Here I must immediately intervene with the chaotic unbridled investments along the Black Sea coast. The rapid development at the beginning of the century quickly established that there were simply no people for anything, but it did not "grow" them either. The reason is the culture of short-term and maximally sharpened investment in personnel, hence the inevitable new tendency to use emigrants, but at very basic prices. This is the immortal understanding of the average Bulgarian businessman, who in principle has not heard of staff development and somehow deeply believes that the turnover of minimum wages without insurance will push him forward.
This is again a type of established culture that the Ministry of Tourism should fight against. But I fear that in this ministry - including all the tourist boards there and the attitude of the bureaucracy in general - the first thought is about the profit from the two-month season, and not a real goal-setting for the future. Yes, there are individual people with vision who understand that without a general reversal of the service model, there is no way to expect results, but they cannot reverse the trend.
Why is it better in Turkey and Greece?
And now the most interesting thing: why is service put on a pedestal in other cultures? I will try to explain about Turkey and Greece as the heirs of the Ottoman and to some extent the Eastern Roman Empire. I will even call on Kazantzakis for help - his magnificent "draft" in "Captain Michalis" how the Greeks, even under the Ottomans, are the best in attentive service means a lot. At the first level, it starts from obedience, but later develops into a whole culture of welcoming and benevolence towards the guest, which is a tradition mainly in Eastern cultures. Ultimately, it can be traced back to the early Christian influence, which through syncretic practices was transferred to the later Muslim worldview. And this far before the simple business understanding that if you are in the service sector, the first and most important thing is service.
Max Weber in "The Economic Ethics of World Religions" also reflects on this issue in one place and one of the conclusions he reaches is that despite the different cultural context, all major cultures are susceptible to hospitality; i.e. that hospitality is inherent in us, but far from all of us "implant" it. He also speaks of the culture of insults back during the First World War, i.e. a whole century before the culture of insults today, part of which is the aggressive "I don't owe you".
Yet, if we have to look for only one reason for the poor Bulgarian service in general, we cannot help but look for it above all in the tragic and deceptive equalization of the sotsa. Communism has taught at least two generations to lie to the system and not to understand normal social stratification - hence the mass feeling that the person who has to serve you is considered personally undervalued because he brings you a salad. This is a kind of simple ultra-crepidarianism - "shoemaker, no higher than the shoe".
How long will we be sour servants, instead of kings of service?
We are wonderful only for good examples and only when we see a concrete benefit. We have a problem with looking into the future - this applies to everyone employed in services.
Ergo, the Greek peasant, who understood long ago that he should do you a favor, welcome you to the table, give you something for free (which is not free, but it seems like it), etc., is unattainably great because he cleverly sells not only a product, but also an experience. In business theory, this is a type of "seduction" that we simply are not good at.
The only hope here is that the market will regulate things again, i.e. reality itself will force Bulgarian service to rise.
Until then, we will not be kings, but poor and sour servants in the service business.
This text expresses the opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the State Gazette as a whole.