Changi Airport CNY discounts for PRCs only

Posted on February 16, 2013 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Airport’s insensitive sale promotion’, 16 Feb 2013, ST Forum

(Ben Ho): …I had checked in at Terminal 3 for a flight to Shanghai late last month. I stopped to buy some chocolates and was told by the cashier that travellers holding a Chinese passport would receive a 20 per cent discount. Being an ethnic Chinese but not from China, I was not entitled to the discount.

I thought that was the end of it, but when I was walking towards the boarding gate, I noticed large signs and brochures in front of the information counter that were only in Chinese. On them were Chinese New Year greetings as well as information on a variety of discounts and offers at all three terminals exclusively for Chinese passport holders. Many stores were participating in this promotion.

I am amazed at such an insensitive promotion, especially in a multicultural society. It is disrespectful to have all promotional materials in a language that is neither the national language nor the official first language. Having a promotion based solely on nationality is also an unacceptable snub to other tourists.

I lodged a complaint with Changi Airport’s public relations office and received a reply saying it “organises different promotions from time to time, targeting different customers”. The Christmas promotions were listed as an example. But those promotions were open to everyone, and all information on them was in English.

One can argue that it is only a marketing tactic. However, there are many ethnic Chinese who are not from China but also celebrate the Chinese New Year. It is unacceptable that one of the world’s top airports should give exclusive rights to people of a certain nationality.

A very Snaky deal

Changi Airport spokesperson Robin Goh explained in his apology that such promotions coincided with the peak travel period for Chinese nationals. Still, it’s like having a Christmas promotion only for people who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, or a Valentine’s Day promotion targetting couples only. There’s a fine line between ‘targetted’ and ‘discriminatory’ selling. If I give free drinks to women based on the size of their boobs it is discrimination against the less endowed because D cup women are not necessarily bigger customers than A cup ones.  Here, it is the shameless, strategic targetting of rich PRC pockets first, though the use of the CNY festivities as an excuse for this entitlement does put the true meaning of the New Year in a god-awful light.

There were hints of this happening since last year. Knowing that PRCs made up a whopping 20% of sales at the airport, senior vice president of airside concession Ivy Wong acknowledged that Chinese nationals were a ‘very affluent group of people’, and revealed that the airport will be ‘rolling out programmes to tap on the spending behaviour‘ of Chinese nationals, shying away from details. So I looked up what ‘airside concession’ is all about. According to a recruitment website it is ‘supporting the implementation of policies and activities in retail planning and leasing, in order to continuously improve and enhance our Transit Malls’ retail mix’. The title suggests something more intimately linked with aircraft, like leasing hot dog stands on the runway. But no, you don’t even need to know how planes work to get the job. And ‘tapping on spending behaviour’ is simply getting people to part with their money i.e marketing, promotion, the works.

This isn’t the first preferential selling attempt by a prominent organisation. Last year, Starhub offered freebies worth $50 for ‘expats’ from select countries participating in the Euro cup finals. The company cleaned up their mess by extending the offer to all fans to make up for what they called ‘scoring an own goal’. Changi would do well to follow suit, given what little time we have left this festive season. How about giving everyone an Ang Pow when they shop at the airport? Hurry before offer ends on the last day of CNY!

Airports are no longer mere transport stations. Gone are the days of just sitting around reading the paper in the departure lounge with a cup of chalky coffee in your hand. Fashionista paradise aside, Changi has also become a hub for fancy lucky draws and jackpot games that entitle you to a shot at becoming an instant millionaire. In the 80′s, such gimmickry were questioned on their selection process and racial bias. Someone lamented that awards like the ’4th million visitor to Singapore’ tend to be given to Caucasians rather than Asians.With all its promotional fanfare and bounty of giveaway riches, one tends to forget that they’re in a departure terminal, but rather the shopper’s equivalent of Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, where the boarding pass in your hand is your very own Golden Ticket.

In 2011, one Chinese businessman spent quarter of a million dollars on a botttle of whiskey at the airport, as part of a ‘Masters of Spirits’ promotion, an invitation-only showcase targetting true ‘connoisseurs’ and ‘collectors’ of the world’s most expensive booze. With such filthy-rich visitors walking around just waiting to snap on any bait you dangle before them, this CNY ‘targetted promotion’ was a simple matter of opportunistic greed. You only have so much time to snare a big customer before they catch a flight. I’m surprised Changi didn’t offer free tram rides for PRCs just to get them from one participating shop to another. It also doesn’t matter to the people at airside concessions if these same rich buggers start rioting and abusing your ground staff over flight delays. In fact, all the better so they have more time to, you know, buy whiskeys and stuff to drown their sorrows.

Cops vs Shoppers

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Filed under: 1980s, 2013, Advertisements, Changi airport, Chinese New Year, Money, PRCs, Shopping malls, Tourists | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Buffalo hunter caught with bullets at Changi airport

Posted on January 3, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Aussie woman found with live ammo at Changi airport’, 3 Jan 2012, article in sg.yahoo news.

An Australian woman was let off with a warning after she was found with two rounds of live ammunition at Changi Airport on 12 October last year. According to a Northern Territory News report, Jessica Powter, 34, had left the two 8cm-long bullets used to shoot buffalo in her camera bag after a one-off hunting trip three years ago.

“The bullets were rolling about in the car so I put them in my backpack and forgot about them,” she was quoted by the paper as saying. The camera bag had supposedly passed several airport checks previously, including two at Brisbane and one at Cairns.

Powter, who was returning to Darwin via Singapore from a holiday in Thailand, said that she had been detained for 23 hours and that she had her passport confiscated, was searched and interrogated, then handcuffed and escorted from the airport.

Aussie huntresses who gun down innocent animals aside, Filipinos have also been known to be detained for bringing in live or spent bullets, commonly used as ‘talismans and amulets’. In 2008, a Malaysian woman was caught for wearing a belt made of empty cartridges, the reason given by a ICA inspector was that these could be ‘filled with gunpowder and used to hurt someone’.   It’s far easier to fill plastic bags with boiling water and drop them onto random passers-by from the top of a building, than find an underground local lab to synthesize gunpowder, then nick a police officer’s pistol to discharge your bullets. If I were to bring in a cannonball would I be detained as well, considering the nearest weapon that it can fit into, though unlikely to be shot from,  is at Fort Siloso, Sentosa? According to the Arms and Explosives Act, a cannonball would possibly fall into the classification of a ‘projectile’ or ‘missile’, though it’s unlikely that customs officers would be able to distinguish this medieval ammo from a bowling ball.

2 years post 9/11, anything resembling phallic ammunition got customs officers fired up into a frenzy. In 2003, dummy missiles on a model aircraft were mistaken for live rounds, leading to a Briton being detained for 10 hours despite the filial intentions of buying the offending article as a gift from Vietnam for her father.  Which means GI Joe toys or anything that so much as squirts shots of goo would come under scrutiny as well. Like Powter, a case of absent-mindedness was a convenient excuse for a Malaysian cop in 2002, when 1o bullets were found in his bag at Changi. In 2001 itself, a French soldier was caught by local customs for carrying a bullet as a souvenir in his WALLET. Incidentally, he also managed to whisk it past the Australian authorities at Sydney airport, which either suggest lax security Down under, or that buffalo-hunting equipment is as commonplace and acceptable as fishing lines and hooks.  The contraband was confiscated and he was let off with a warning, though one wonders what if he had bought a boomerang instead.

Today, you’re not allowed to bring in lighters that even resemble bullets, in fear that terrorists or bank robbers in the guise of taking a smoke, would suddenly wave it around threateningly at people going ‘Don’t move! I’ve got a BULLET!’. ICA officers generally give the benefit of the doubt for people leaving ammunition in their luggage, though the shameful handcuffing and warning is a slap on the wrist for anyone trying their luck and succeeding in lying their way out of it. Powter had to ‘bite the bullet’ through detention as she was a special case; a buffalo hunter, meaning someone who’s not commissioned to use firearms to enforce the law or protect a country, but more likely to succeed at a distance killing shot than the average person. According to an Australian report she ‘felt like a criminal’. Tell that to an animal lover, or the woman detained for buying a harmless toy airplane for her father.

Filed under: 2000s, 2011, Animal abuse, Bureaucrats, Changi airport, Tourists, Violence | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

Tissue chope-ing a Singaporean tradition

Posted on April 26, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘At Changi Airport’, 26 April 2011, My Point, ST Forum and ‘It’s uniquely Singaporean and very rude’, 26 April 2011, ST Forum

(MR JEREMY CHIAN): ‘I recently went to Changi Airport to pick up an overseas guest. While waiting at the arrival hall I cringed on seeing huge posters informing visitors that if they saw tissue packets placed on foodcourt dining tables, it meant the seats were already taken…How embarrassed I was when my guest inquired if this was the culture in Singapore. Publicising this practice gives our country a bad image.’

(Su Timmins): …At a well-known food chain, just as my husband and I were heading towards a table with our food, two girls walked in and headed straight for our table to place their tissue packs. I told them it was our table and they moved to ‘reserve’ another. We finished and left before they even got their food.

As we left, another two girls placed their tissue packs on our table and there were at least 15 people in the queue ahead of them.

When I complained to the owner, his reply shocked me. This was the custom and culture of Singapore, he said, adding that he did not think he should reject the traditions followed in the place he operated.

Since when and how has this practice become a Singaporean cultural tradition?

The humble, practically worthless tissue pack has the perfect size and visibility as an object to stake claim on a space, compared to say, a watch, a pen or anything that one is less willing to lose. By its function, it is understood that someone wants to eat there, and the very fact that it is so dispensable means patrons  are aware  of the tenuous hold  that the tissue pack has on eating space, since no hearts would be broken if someone swiped it.  Likewise there’s no authority or  SOP on tissue chope-ing, and nothing illegal too if someone throws it away or assumes that it was left behind by a previous patron and sits down anyway, though you would earn some scowls throughout your meal as a consequence of your tactless flouting of the Singaporean ‘chope’ custom.

Singaporeans nonetheless have grown to accept this ‘unspoken rule’, just like how it’s accepted to slurp your ramen loudly in a Japanese noodle shop, waste water at a Songkran festival in Thailand, or run with the bulls risking a butt-gore in Spain.  These customs aren’t pretty, even absurd, but our perceived ‘rudeness’ of seat chope-ing can’t possibly be worse than our reputation as ruthless vandal caners. What matters is that we have achieved a social equilibrium and mutual understanding of the  gesture amicably without ending up in a brawl tossing chilli at each other. Some foreigners even claim that reserving seats (including using someone to ‘jaga’, a staple method for those who eschew the tissue-chope) is unheard of in their country (see below, Is anyone sitting here? 8 Feb 2001, Voices, Today).  The science behind ideal turnaround times at hawker centre tables is as fuzzy as traffic prediction, so it’s hard to tell if a free for all no reservations system  as the writer below suggests would ensure that everyone walks away satisfied and without a black eye. In fact, with prohibitions on reservations, you’d see people rushing for seats, clashing trays, spilling food all over the place and fighting because of the two predisposing factors to an ugly situation: Hungry. And being Singaporean.

In fact, some would even argue that tissue-choping is a time saver (Tissue system’s a time saver, 17 April 2007, Voices, Today), ensuring that tables are occupied for less time since the group would otherwise have been waiting for the ‘choper’ to finish his meal before giving up the table together. Which probably explains how this ‘system’ has evolved from the stress of a tight lunch hour, sometimes half-hour even, that most Singaporeans are allowed as a side effect of our obsession with productivity, unlike the leisurely hour and a half long lunches (power naps inclusive) which our complaining tourists are used to.

The problem really, is ENDORSING through posters as what Changi Airport does that tissue chope-ing is our de rigeur way of doing things here, alongside say getting the death penalty for drug trafficking. One might as well include it in the disembarkation form for tourists to check the acknowledgment box that says ‘I will not sit at tables with tissue packs on them while eating out’.  This effectively tilts the delicate balance in favour of the tissue-chopers, who would otherwise be forced to compete with the likes of people who just throw their tissues away or ignore them. It also means that you can get away with the ‘phantom tissue’ argument, whereby you accuse an innocent random patron for stealing your tissue pack just so you can squeeze into his table at the expense of his lunch companions. In any case, there’s nothing anyone can do about such deeply entrenched behaviour (at least 10 years) short of imposing a fine for ‘littering’, if not for ‘reserving seats’. So other than just making do, we might as well make the tissue pack a national icon too. Hey, it’s uniquely Singaporean, what.

Filed under: 2000s, 2011, Changi airport, Hawkers, Local food, Tissue paper | Tagged: , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Singaporeans plugged into headphones all the time

Posted on November 30, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Being friendly will help foreigners feel more at home’, 30 Nov 2010, My Paper

(Tian Guiqing): …There are people from all over the world living and working in Singapore, and this is helpful in fostering cultural exchanges.

However, there has not been enough sharing between cultures. People here need to communicate with one another, and learn to understand the social customs and habits of people from different backgrounds.

If we understand and respect people from different countries, it is easier to be friendly with one another.

Perhaps we should start from the basics – with commuters practising courtesy on public transport.

A friendly smile or a hello will be a nice gesture to fellow commuters, instead of being plugged into headphones all the time.

This takes only a few seconds but will go a long way in making the atmosphere in trains and buses friendly and will help foreigners feel more at ease.

Good intentions to be admired no doubt, but Ms Tian comes across as an urban Luddite from a land with prairies, milkmen and hay-loaded horsewagons who has probably little experience travelling to modern, bustling cities like ours, cities which suffer from characteristic disdain for our fellow man, not to mention foreigners. What the writer proposes is the kind of bloated rhetoric a New World foreign invader would deliver before a miscellany of tribes who have worked and lived together for more than a century with the occasional scuffle over defaced totem poles . Like any effort to harmonise ethnicities anywhere in the world, it’s obviously easier said than done. In the first place, there has to be some evidence that we don’t intermingle enough, and unless Ms Tian can cite some concrete examples of near-riots occurring because people celebrate Christmas during Deepavali, such a letter probably boils down to a bad personal experience lazily extrapolated to Singaporeans in general.

Technically, before one even begins to understand another’s culture, not to mention initiate a conversation, it would probably be useful to also speak the same language, and if our foreign friends don’t make the effort to assimilate into the local lingo, the natural assumption by most Singaporeans is that they prefer to be left to themselves. It also doesn’t help that we Singaporeans are generally a cold lot too, whether towards a foreigner or a long-time next door neighbour. The general resistance to playing host thus perpetuates a social vicious cycle in most situations with the classic exception of uncles at the kopitiam cavorting with PRC beer ladies, a tip-of-iceberg example of how such relationships can probably exist only with sexual undertones, where the context of ‘fostering cultural exchange’ would be nothing more than an underwhelming euphemism for a more primitive sort of interaction.

Smiling randomly at strangers on trains may work in a little hamlet where everybody knows which fishmonger you patronise, but any overt friendliness here will be viewed with nervous suspicion. Allow me to ‘share’ a common term that Singaporeans will toss around for good measure in the event that a stranger greets them with a warm and bubbly ‘Good morning!’ on the train. They will wonder if you are ‘Siao!’ or are hiding a clipboard with a survey ‘that will only take 2 minutes’ to fill. So, instead of blaming Singaporeans for being unfriendly, perhaps one should look at this from a ‘it takes two hands to clap’ perspective, and remind yourself that this is Singapore, not the Shire from Lord of the Rings. Even if one made immigration officers smile lovingly at foreigners, locals will complain about preferential treatment, as seen in this 3 Jan 2003 letter, Today.

 

Filed under: 2000s, 2010, Bureaucrats, Changi airport, Foreign workers, MRT, PRCs, SBS Buses, Tourists | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

I heart SIN

Posted on August 11, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From I (heart) Sing, not Sin, 11 Aug 2010, Voices, Today online

(Eng Lam Seng): I WAS aghast when I saw the cover the T section in the Aug 7-8 edition of Weekend Today. The graphic on the cover page shouts: “I (heart) SIN”.

I am shocked by the design, which seems to suggest that we should enjoy living in sin – to live morally offensive lifestyles, regardless of religious inclination.

Wouldn’t it have been more pleasant and attractive for the graphic to instead state: “I (heart) SING”? That would reflect the joy with which we celebrate National Day, whether actually in song or by taking part in other activities.

In the same vein, the luggage tag stuck to our baggages at Changi Airport also denotes Singapore as SIN.

Could the airport authorities not just add the letter “G” to spell SING? Unless, of course, they really mean to tell all travellers that this is really a place of SIN.

It does look sinister

‘In the same vein’, citizens of Tonga would ‘heart’ to weigh a TON, the Spanish are telekinetic (ESP), Paraguayans are kaypoh (PRY), Macau people love fast food (MAC), Guyanese are GUY crazy,  Brazillians love undergarments (BRA), the Cook islands (COK) people are, well, you get my drift. There are no 4-letter official country abbreviations by the way (yes, even GUAM is GUM and LAOS is LAO) and in any case, what’s not to love about SIN? Don’t we love eating (Gluttony), shopping (GREED) and making babies (LUST)? Don’t we have our little own SIN cities in the form of RWS and MBS? Well fine,  maybe to make everyone happy Today artists should have stuck to ‘I heart SG’ instead, though that would incur the wrath of people who think that sounds like a website address. It’s the kind of moronic pun that juvenile minds would only make a big deal of, and hey,  it’s not that far from the truth that we all live in SIN anyway. Even if it’s really an insider joke judging from the caption ’42 tasty, stylish, zippy etc’ below the offending abbreviation, it’s just a news feature cover design for god’s sake, not a decal to put on every damn YOG bus or taxi at the airport. I wonder what people who think  abbreviations are the devil’s mother-tongue would say.

Filed under: 2010, Changi airport, It Should Have Been.., Names | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Singapore Cinta Airport

Posted on February 23, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From How’s this as a love-ly name for new airport 23 March 1981 ST Forum

CIA (Changi International Airport) sounds ominous and smacks of espionage and covert operations.

I was think (sic) of Cinta, taken from the initial letters of Changi International Airport. It means love in Malay and would be a handy nickname.

The authorities made one of its most important right moves to date by ignoring this absurd plea. Cinta is unpronounceable to Westerners, and we wouldn’t be number two airport in the world if someone had taken this suggestion seriously.  Speaking of wacky airport names. There’s actually a Fak Fak airport (Indonesia), Puka Puka airport (Cook islands) and a Batman airport (Turkey). Check out more here.

Filed under: 1980s, Changi airport, It Should Have Been.., Names | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

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