Getting ripped off in Poland! Is it normal? or should it be tolerated?

For three weeks my local supermarket had no washing up liquid of any type but 15 idifferent but identical brands of window spray. This was eleven years after communism ended. It just didn't occur to them to pop to the cash and carry or even buy some from a rival and sell with a penny mark-up. Now it's French owned and efficient.

A Polish friend says that if there was socialism in the desert there would be a shortage of sand in six weeks - an old Polish saying. It's evidently and clearly untrue - they do "nie ma" whatever the economic system.

Didn't occur to whom exactly? The shop assistants? You say it was a supermarket. How can even a supermarket manager make this decision on their own, without agreement from higher up? I have yet to see supermarket staff in the UK "popping to the cash and carry" when they run out of something I wanted to buy.

A supermarket's manager's job is to make sure this situation doesn't happen in the first place, or why would they be in the job?

I am probably stupid, but I always assumed that a supermarket manager is there to carry out decisions made by supermarket HQ, and to ensure that everything runs more or less smoothly in their store. Somehow I don't see supermarket chains as a democratic structure where grass-roots initiative would be welcome. Maybe I'm wrong.

Easily. He/She is the manager and responsible for maintaining stock.


A phone call away.


Perhaps that's because no British supermarket would ever run out of such a staple product as washing up liquid for three days, never mind three weeks. And if they did, the manager would no longer be the manager.

I remember my local Asda in the UK having a power cut. A supervisor stood at each check out, did a quick count of the items and asked for an estimated amount, rather lower than the actual bill would be. When it happened at a supermarket in Warsaw, they just threw the customers out. That was last year.


In one simple sentence, you've summed up the problem with Eastern European public life - nobody will make a decision. Why? Fear of getting it wrong? Apathy? Idleness? Given that the Polish language has no cognate for the phrase 'community-minded', could it be something deeper?


No. Just a victim of your culture.

+ 100

I have said a fair bit about Poland - good and bad. Probably mostly bad on balance. I apologise now for a lot of it.

Customer service aside, the best thing about Poland/Polish people by far is their loyalty. This might fly in the face of some other comments but this has been my honest (if limited) experience. Very straight, loyal, no BS people.

(swansong)

Mmmm, not many of the ones I've met in the Uk. Even my partner's own brother ripped off her and her other brother several times and I've heard plenty of tales from Poles of how they've been ripped off by their own country folk. Not saying most Poles are like this; but also wouldn't say that generally speaking you can describe them as ' Very straight, loyal, no BS people'.