I had a rather strange dream the other day. I knew it was a dream because it bore little relation to the real world in which I have become all-too-accustomed to.

Caprabo likes to think of itself as an upmarket, very relatively speaking, chain supermarket here. In my dream, I had just finished selecting my groceries and stood in line with my trolley at the checkout. I didn’t have to wait long and before I knew it, my assorted items were making their way along the conveyor belt into the hands of the smiling cashier (“Good morning!”) who dutifully ran them through the bar code scanner, before placing them back onto the conveyor where they eventually transplanted themselves into a little area of my own where I could bag them.

The cashier was able to provide me with a few moments in which to start opening some bags and for me to start packing. In fact, whilst I was reaching for my credit card and ID, she (“May I help you?”) actually started to bag some items herself. How thoughtful of her to do so.

I handed over my card and ID and whilst the transaction was being processed I was able to continue with my packing. She presented me with the receipt (“Sign here please …”), I signed it, (“Thank you!”), collected my cards and finished what bagging remained. “Goodbye!”, she said, cheerily, as she patiently waited for me to finish my packing before serving the next customer. “Goodbye!”, I said, leaving.

Customer service like that - smooth, friendly, helpful and above all, sympathetic - is, I have found, unfortunately something of a rarity in central Barcelona. Eye contact, patience and yes, even a little smile, are at a premium locally and one only notices it when it actually happens. Nowadays I only ever venture into any Caprabo as a last resort - they’ve exhausted my patience and ruined what little pleasure I have in the ‘shopping experience’ with them. I’d just become so frustrated with their workers’ attitude - in the beginning, it was a fun and novel experience having my groceries hurled at me after being scanned and then left to mingle with another person’s shopping whilst struggling to bag the items I had still yet to pay for - I decided to simply walk away and take my business elsewhere.

The thing is, in my experience, the type of customer experience described above is not only unique to Caprabo.

The post office (the Correos y Telégrafos), the bus and metro (Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB)), banks and the department store El Corte Inglés (though it is better then average, it still has problems), amongst many (don’t even get me started on employees working within the local and national government bureaucracy …), are all guilty of employing too many staff who do their best to, in short, treat the customer in such a way that it verges on contempt.

Okay, you say, there are people like that in this world everywhere. That’s true. But to find such behaviour so highly prevalent in a city as big and outward-facing as Barcelona, I do find it amazing that so many businesses and organisations - which are trying to convince the public to spend their hard-earned cash with them - do such a rotten job in training their staff the basics of customer interaction. I’ve had the great fortune of having had the chance to see a little more of the world than some and I can honestly say I have received better service and attention in some middle-of-nowhere places in Guatemala, Ecuador and Honduras than I have had in many of the first-world shops and facilities I have visited locally. In fact I still remember distinctly the friendly smile I used to get from the machine-gun toting Ecuadorian security guard in Quito whenever I popped into the bank he was guarding in order to get myself some more local currency. Now that’s style.

The best I can expect from the old guy behind the marble counter, who, as fate would have it, I seem to get disserved by most of the time, working in the post office on Ronda Universitat, is a grunt. In fact, most transactions I have had with him during the past four years have been of the very silent type, and the occasional grunt is actually a welcome sign that he can at least sense the presence of another soul on the opposite side of the counter.

I’m sure that the people I’m describing above are actually quite nice people away form their daily grind. Well, apart from the post office guy. It’s just a shame that the management within the organisations that they work for have been unable to drum into them the importance of a good, no, great, experience for the customer.

The one where the resident customer, the visiting tourist or the temporary student can look back at their time in the shops and their interactions with service providers in Barcelona and say, when asked, ‘yeah, the people there were so friendly and helpful’.