The issue:
In The Sofia Echo last week, the From All Sides feature included a number of foreigners living in Bulgaria addressing the question of the standards of service in the country.

"In most cases, service in Bulgaria is, while not as out-of-the-way helpful as it is in the United States, sufficiently decent. It's like the reputation that service has in France: a bad one, but personal experiences tend to prove the stereotypes wrong," said Magdalena Rahn.

Caitlin Foley said that in contrast to the principle of the "customer is always right", in Bulgaria most of the time the customer feels not only wrong, but also at fault, but she added that it was not uncommon to get excellent service in shops and restaurants, and to be treated properly by the various Government ministries. Foley added that one reason that could lie behind inadequate service was that many people were being paid very little. "Putting on a show that they care, just because you are a `foreigner with money', can get old really quickly," she said.

Emanuel Roeseler, an expert in the hospitality industry and currently adviser to the board of directors of the Grand Hotel Sofia, said that while in the state bureaucracy the rule seemed to be "why make it easy if it can be complicated?" there had been an improvement in the levels of service in the six years that he had been living in Bulgaria, "but some are still far behind".
"Europeans have to be aware that coming to Bulgaria has its challenges, but in general we can and will expect changes in the near future," Roeseler said.

There remains, however, the question of how Bulgarians feel about the levels of service in the country. An obvious question is whether Bulgarians get worse or better service than foreigners. On one hand, there may be the view that foreigners get "better" service (where this may mean swifter service, with a greater show of effort, or perhaps just a more polite or even deferential attitude) or that they get "worse" service, for a number of reasons, which could include a language barrier, cultural differences in the expectations of customers and service providers, or even, as Atanas Paskalev suggests on these pages this week, that some foreigners bring bad service on themselves by behaving badly.

At a dinner party in between the publication of last week's From All Sides and this week's, a thirtysomething Bulgarian friend suggested to me that Bulgarians had long since grown weary of the subject of "service" because of the associations that it had with urgings that emanated from the state during the communist era.

The question also arises what should be the real measure and standard of service to which Bulgaria now should aspire. Your expectations may vary depending on whether you are from Cairo, Christchurch, Cape Town, Cape Cod, Caracas, Copenhagen or the Comoros.

This is why, in assessing the standards of service in Bulgaria, we must now hear from some Bulgarians themselves.