Hey, everyone! I'm Charlie, and this is "Charlie doesn't like chocolate"—a podcast about my life as an international student in Canada. I'll be posting every Tuesday and Friday just to improve my English. I hope you enjoy listening!
I still have lost the internet at home so I’m uploading it at the library. Also, from now on I decide the day to post the podcast at 6pm on Tuesday and Friday in Vancouver in order for you to understand easily when it is uploaded.
Anyways, today I’m going to talk about restaurants in Canada.
In my opinion, One of the biggest differences compared to Japanese ones is that we as patrons have to pay tips for their services. On average, we pay 15% of total sales as tips whenever we dine in restaurants. I know there are some controversial backgrounds to paying tips but basically, I think it is a very good thing because it motivates workers in restaurants to think about how they provide good customer service.
As I see it, we as patrons in Japan, people still think “Patrons are the god.” Originally, it was used as “a mindset to delight patrons". However, it has been incorrectly perceived as "patrons are in a superior position than workers in restaurants.” even though we don’t have to pay additional fees for services, which means the service itself is included in the price. It is too much, actually, whenever we work in the field of customer services, we tend to easily get complaints from patrons.
However, here in Vancouver, workers in restaurants are just playing one role in the industry, they don’t have to care about patrons too much, and also patrons have the responsibilities to pay for the service they got. On the other hand, we don’t have to pay tips if you are not satisfied with the service. We have to explain why we don’t want to pay tips, though. It is impressive because the relationship between patrons and servers is almost equal. That’s interesting, isn’t it?
