> ubers worth is their international recognition as a premium service
Anecdotal perhaps, but that's not my impression among friends & family. (based in Central & Western Europe) Unless you consider "less likely to be totally ripped off" as "premium". Which I guess it is to some extent, but taxi drivers in many western countries have set the bar so extremely low in terms of service that competing services such as Uber just need to meet the bare minimum of expectations customers would have in other industries.
In Japan meanwhile, as has been said by others, you literally get the white glove treatment in any run-of-the mill taxi and screwing people over totally goes against the grain of the local culture, so it's hard to see how other services might differentiate themselves. Plus of course, public transportation in the cities is fantastic and reasonably priced.
(We recently did a trip to Japan with our then-9-month-old, which meant we had more luggage than we'd normally like. So we ended up taking a few taxis instead of dragging it all the few hundred metres from the train station to whatever next hotel/apartment we were staying; in Europe, many taxi drivers would probably not even have stopped to pick us up if they'd seen us with all our stuff.)
>taxi drivers in many western countries have set the bar so extremely low in terms of service
>In Japan meanwhile... you literally get the white glove treatment in any run-of-the mill taxi and screwing people over totally goes against the grain of the local culture
This is the stuff that the anti-Uber crowd just didn't seem to understand. Taxis in America will routinely screw you over and drive you in circles, knowing that you probably don't know any better, just to increase your fare, and the customer service level is abominable. Japan just isn't like this: screwing customers over is just something they don't do there, and having extremely high customer service with incredible levels of politeness is just the norm there, even in simple convenience stores.
Uber got where it did in America because the taxi industry was absolutely horrible, so all it took was someone competing with them and not being as horrible and offering decent service to become wildly popular. The same situation never existed in Japan.
> Japan just isn't like this: screwing customers over is just something they don't do there, and having extremely high customer service with incredible levels of politeness is just the norm there, even in simple convenience stores.
There are a few scam stores in Tokyo, there's one that sells paintings to tourists, another one with monks that go around pushing things into your hands, and supposedly some ripoff girls bars. But not many.
Oh, but you can't get food substitutes in any restaurants and they'll deal with allergies by kicking you out of the store.
> and having extremely high customer service with incredible levels of politeness is just the norm there, even in simple convenience stores.
>Oh, but you can't get food substitutes in any restaurants and they'll deal with allergies by kicking you out of the store.
Yes, I saw several restaurants that warned that they don't change their recipe. It makes sense: they've optimized their process in the kitchen for those particular dishes, and aren't going to just change things around for one customer. It didn't seem to be a big problem there. So I just have to wonder: why do so many Americans these days have food allergies? This wasn't a problem decades ago. From a little bit of Googling, it seems that Japanese just don't have problems with food allergies the way Americans do. Honestly, they're right to kick you out of the store: you're too much of a liability, and they just aren't prepared to deal with people with such problems.
I have no idea what your point is here. This is an article about the level of politeness to be used by retain employees (the Japanese language has several levels of politeness built-in). I wasn't talking about any details about the usage of the language by employees, I was just talking about them being polite in general, something you don't see in American stores much.
Anecdotal perhaps, but that's not my impression among friends & family. (based in Central & Western Europe) Unless you consider "less likely to be totally ripped off" as "premium". Which I guess it is to some extent, but taxi drivers in many western countries have set the bar so extremely low in terms of service that competing services such as Uber just need to meet the bare minimum of expectations customers would have in other industries.
In Japan meanwhile, as has been said by others, you literally get the white glove treatment in any run-of-the mill taxi and screwing people over totally goes against the grain of the local culture, so it's hard to see how other services might differentiate themselves. Plus of course, public transportation in the cities is fantastic and reasonably priced.
(We recently did a trip to Japan with our then-9-month-old, which meant we had more luggage than we'd normally like. So we ended up taking a few taxis instead of dragging it all the few hundred metres from the train station to whatever next hotel/apartment we were staying; in Europe, many taxi drivers would probably not even have stopped to pick us up if they'd seen us with all our stuff.)