I cannot think about Darty without thinking about Télématin (the France 2 morning show) and the intros (and outros) to the weather reports, brought to you by Darty (le contrat de confiance).

However, my comment actually concerns the gender of pèse-personne.

French likes to create compound words with the “verb-object” format, such as pèse-personne. There are also brise-glace (ice breaker), ouvre-boîte (can opener), tire-bouchon (corkscrew), coupe-papier (paper knife), coupe-vent (windcheater or windbreaker), lance-pierres (catapult), attrape-nigaud (con game) and many, many more. Unless I am mistaken, these are always masculine.

1 — Simply ask. “Comment ça se dit ? UN pèse-personne ou UNE pèse-personne ?”

2 — Avoid the grammatical article. “On veut voir les différents modèles de pèse-personne.”

3 — Naive enquiries in round-about language. “Bonjour. Montrez-nous, s’il vous plaît, les appareils qui nous indiquent notre poids.”

Curiously, you seemed to be complaining about the necessity of having to communicate in French with French people. I would have imagined, on the contrary, that this was your goal…

For learners of French, the two fundamental phrase models are:

— “Que veut dire DEGUELASSE ?” [Merci Jean Seberg]

— “Comment dit-on DISGUSTING en français ?”

The rest is just practice…

Thanks very much for your comments! The point I was trying to make (somewhat obliquely) is that I think the employees who write down numbers for you – presumably, as Kirk said, to earn commissions – are not actually performing a useful service from my point of view as a customer. They’re complicating, not helping, the process of buying something, so what the store needs is not more of them, but a way to buy goods that doesn’t require each purchase to go through a salesperson!

Joe

However, they seem to be happy enough with life here, and I doubt they’re going to change things just because I don’t like them. Perhaps it’s like that article you wrote on ITOTD about baguettes – the French don’t consider buying bread twice a day to be an inconvenience, that’s just how it is (I’m paraphrasing here).

Your Darty store sounds like Argos in the UK, though there you are allowed to write the product numbers on pieces of paper yourself before paying and collecting your items. BUT, if you had such difficulty finding a free salesman, doesn’t it suggest that they need more not fewer staff?

Just a thought from a fellow expat.

Alastair

These two things are not unrelated. The French government made it so hard to discharge employees that companies became much more shy about hiring people in the first place. Thus the high unemployment rate.

If you reverse roles for a moment you can see why this is so. Imagine this… To quit as an employee in France you must explain (in zillions of paper forms) why you are quitting the job, you must fulfill many regulations that restrict your ability to quit the job, you must pay the employer lots of money to make up for the damage you have done by quitting your position, etc.

Certainly you would consider employment akin to slavery (or signing up for the US military in stop-loss mode). You would prefer to find alternatives to regular employment… Perhaps temp positions, unofficial employment or just finding some way to avoid work at all.

This is the position that French (and many other West European) governments have put employers.

Kirk: The things I’ve noticed, like everything requiring a conversation, weren’t by any means specific to Darty; I’ve seen this many, many times in all sorts of French establishments. I was merely saying that my experience at Darty illustrated that. Certainly, your experience may have been different, but I’ve found that it’s extremely normal to have to talk to a person to get anything done, things that would be automated (or at least explained by signs) in the U.S.

First, “Everything requires a conversation”. That’s an interesting thought, but false. You cannot judge French commerce by Darty, which is a store that sells lots of things that are too big to have on shelves. Not the scales, but all the rest of the stuff. French stores that sell such things are very old-fashioned – in the sense that you need a paper, then you go somewhere else, then you pay somewhere else, then you pick up your item. This is something you can still see in a handful of old-fashioned patisseries in France as well – you ask for your food, then get a paper, and see the old lady at the cash register, who stamps your paper and gives it back to you.

Darty is a bit of an exception in the way they work. Most other stores will have the smaller items (scales, rasors, etc) on the shelves, but at Darty, the employees get commissions, so they don’t have things on shelves. Otherwise, they would not get a commission for “selling” your scale.

As for drugstores, you still have to ask a pharmacist because of protectionism. That is going to change soon – some non-prescrpition items will be in “libre service” soon, but it is pure protectionism. The pharmacists have been fighting tooth and nail to keep supermarkets from selling such things. Heck, it took forever for supermarkets to even be able to sell band-aids.

And as for the jobs, I strongly disagree. There are far more people in an American supermarket, wandering the aisles, and even – gasp! – bagging your purchases. I have rarely seen any cashier in a supermarket put things in bags, and never additional people bagging and helping customers get their bags to their cars.

No, there is no high job security here. There may have been through the 80s or so, but that’s long gone.

Kirk

On a spaceship, wouldn’t you just need a scale with a zero painted on the face?