I had a privilege to examine Finnish culture and customs as an outsider for couple of years. And there was quite a few unique(ish) things that I noticed.
The most prominent of them being the level and type of customer service.
If you tell a Finnish sales person, that you are just “looking around”, most of them just tell you to call them if you need help and let you browse around in peace. In Asia, in similar situation, the sales person often continued to follow you couple meters behind your back, and if you picked something up, they were there asking about the size or colour you are looking for. At the beginning, that felt extremely uncomfortable, but as the time went on, I got used to it, and found it quite useful at time to time.
What comes to Finns, I feel that most of us would be content to just use machines (for example, self check-out machines in S- group grocery stores). And to be honest, there are days that I am guilty of that too.
Talking about the personal space is already a cliche, but cliches are cliches for reason. The one thing I never got used to was people invading my personal space (to be fair, it may have been bigger than most of my peers had). On day, I was sitting on an empty bench in school, minding my own business and probably trying to finish some assignment. So, there comes one of my peers (we weren’t very close), and decides to sit right next to me. And by that I mean that our shoulders were touching.
The fact that I remember that vividly around five years later, tells how big of an issue that was to me (yeah, yeah, I was overreacting, please don’t laugh).
To be honest, I think that the type of customer service relates closely to the need for a personal space. We Finns may not feel comfortable to socialise with the sales person, or let her or him so up close and personal.
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