Trip to the US-building bonanza

One thing I was happy to see in my hometown is the number of new building that have gone up since I left. My hometown has a reputation of not being a city of growth. One famous author has been qoted as calling it "There is no there there." Well, it's definitely a place to be now.There were tons of new apartment buildings. Now how many of them are affordable, I'm not sure. Then again it's not surprising how many housing units have been built considering that a lot of people are getting priced out of San Francisco. For a while there was a mass exodus out of SF and into the East Bay and beyond. But for the most part, housing prices have gone down considerably. So hopefully those who have moved to my city will stay.
There's also so many new office buildings! My city has a bad rep in the past of not hiring from within the city and instead hiring from the more affluent surrounding cities. Let's hope this time that people who live in my city can also work in my city.  It was good to finally see that the renovation of the Fox theater is underway. There's a gorgeous brand new church on the lake. I was totally blown away at all the development that has gone on and is still going on.

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Customer Service

The one thing I missed so much from the states is customer service. It was so nice to walk into a store and have the employees of the store ask "Can I help you find anything?" or "Did you find everything?" or "Would you like me to check if any of our other stores have this?". It was almost shocking. Now the best customer service in a grocery store that I saw in the states was in a chain that's specific to California, whose initials are NHF. Now this chain was mainly in San Francisco but just recently spread to my part of the bay. I just couldn't believe how friendly everyone was. It definitely gave me a good first impression of the store.
In this part of the world, I'm lucky if I'm even acknowledged by employees. I have to search to find someone to ask where an item is. On one of my first trips since I got back, I asked an employee where a certain item is located and he replied, "I don't know." and turned his back on me and went right back to stocking the store. How rude! Now this is not to say that everyone is like this, but for the most part it seems that customer service is one part that was left out of employee training.

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