世論 What Japan Thinks

goo Ranking recently conducted a survey looking at what kinds of shop staff people find too much bother to deal with.

Demographics

The survey was conducted over the 2nd and 3rd of September 2013 and 1,077 people completed a private web-based questionnaire. 51.0% of the sample were female, 24.5% in their teens, 24.8% in their twenties, 25.2% in their thirties, and 25.5% in their forties. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample. This survey was for the women in the sample only.

Talking of number 13, here’s staff getting over-familiar with Johnny Depp:

My pet hate is mobile phone shop staff, who are totally incapable of answering any even slightly technical question with anything other than “Have you tried turning off and on?” Well, one time when I asked about a crash, they recommended I delete some stuff as my low-end phone’s memory was getting full, but it was full mostly down to all the shovel-ware that they place on the phone and that cannot be deleted! Another time, I went at least thrice about a problem receiving SMS-like messages (docomo Message R, for those who are familiar with docomo) on my smartphone. They checked their computer, my account status, everything, and it wasn’t until about six months later there was a software upgrade to their mail program that finally enabled Message R reception by any smartphone in their range! I can’t really see how three different staff were not aware that such a common feature was not supported, even though they had been selling smartphones for at least two years at that point.

Ranking result

Q: What kinds of shop staff do you find too much bother to deal with? (Sample size=1,077)

Rank		Score
1	Ramen shop staff who complain about me not eating the “right” way	100
2	Electrical superstore staff who try to sell me loads of unwanted software after buying an expensive computer	82.7
3	Electrical superstore staff who try to sell me a low-end computer they cannot get rid of	79.5
4	Clothes shop staff who passionately try to sell me the same clothes as I’m wearing	65.8
5	Electrical superstore staff who try to get me to sign up for a store credit card by blabbering on about its good points	65.4
6	Clothes shop staff who on seeing me trying on an outfit, bring along other items to coordinate with it	64.0
7	Electrical superstore staff who get all flustered when I ask them questions about an item	62.4
8	Taxi drivers who say “I’m not yet too familiar with this area…”	53.1
9	Convenience store staff who look all confused when I give them small change along with a note to round things up (eg offering 103 yen for an 88 yen item)	52.2
10	Convenience store staff who even after I refuse on every visit still offer to make me a point card	49.2
11	Barkeeps with dull stories	46.5
12	Shop staff who cannot look up the price of items that don’t have bar codes	39.9
13	Over-familiar shop staff who chat about everyday things like last night’s television	36.4
14	Shoe shop staff who make comments like “Your feet are really big!”	34.2
15	Supermarket staff who cannot get the scanner to accept a bar code	32.3