In Japan, staff will often “案内します” (walk with the customer) to what he/she is looking to buy.

In the US, IF I can find an employee, I’ll get a vaguely directional hand gesture that might as well be the “bird.” Target is my usual example.

I think it depends on where in the country when it comes to the US. Stores in more rural areas — including Target (but not Walmart so much) — are more likely to have employees that walk (or offer to walk) the customer to the area where they need to go to find the item being searched for. That is if there are employees on the floor and in the aisles and not tied to register/counter/backroom duty. Going from say a Target in say downtown Chicago to a Target in say rural Minnesota doesn’t give me culture shock, it’s just that I expect there to be regional differences of this sort based on a variety of factors.

Personally, I don’t like even being asked for help while shopping; and if I ask for help to locate an item or section, I probably want to shop in relative peace without an employee hovering over me or even lingering around close by and potentially distracting me. Maybe I am just not that easily shocked since I’ve been exposed to differences a lot and just count on it being usual. I generally don’t like shopping in stores in Asia because it seems like I am more likely to be “helped” than I want to be.

It can also be intimidating to walk into small grocery stores in Europe and be expected to order verbally (in a foreign language) when often I want to look at the package in detail to try to figure out whether the item is what I want (For instance are the potato chips salted or flavored? Instant or regular rice/oatmeal? Microwaveable? Is the wine bottled at the chateau?).

I find big shop customer service in Europe to be no better than in the US. I find it worse on average in Europe at big retailers, and probably would find it even more so upon trying to control for how likely it is the store check-out clerk can afford to live within as short commuting distance to the workplace as the store’s customers residing the closest to the store.

I don’t end up in big Target-size, non-grocery shops in Asia too often, so I can’t say as much about their customer service. I’ve been to a lot of rather large grocery stores in Asia — I have myself or had family living in various parts of SE, S and SW Asia, and doing a few grocery runs on visits has been unavoidable there — Europe, the US, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, so I can more comprehensively compare that. By measure of service in grocery stores, I would say the US isn’t bad in this regard — rather it’s comparable enough or even better than what I would say to expect in most parts of the OECD world.

For value for money spent to buy goods, the US is about as good as it gets when you consider what the local median income level can buy. Housing in and around major metropolitan areas and some services in the US can tend to be much less affordable for the average local, but that kind of dynamic is true around a lot of the world when it comes to countries that aren’t major sources of intercontinental refugee flows. Most Swedes can’t afford to move to Stockholm without taking a huge lifestyle hit of sort. Most Indians can’t afford to move to Bombay without taking a huge lifestyle hit of sort. Most Americans can’t afford to move to San Francisco without taking a huge lifestyle hit of sort. Rather for many Americans, the culture shock would be to see the extreme rural poverty that still exists in parts of the Deep South and Appalachia. I have relatives who grew up in South and SE Asia and were used to seeing poverty on the streets. Oh were they shocked to see how bad it could be in parts of the US too. Now that is reverse culture shock.

Some years back, I had to inform a bunch of young US males relocating back to the US that the USG wanted to have them file and update their US residence information each and every time they settled somewhere until a certain age. They were shocked by that, especially after years of being schooled on the US being the “land of the free”. My best bet is that many of them failed to follow the US registration law in terms of keeping there whereabouts updated at least, and thus they were likely subject to prosecution for that crime if the federal prosecutors decided to make prosecution of the relatively privileged males a priority. If they were arrested and prosecuted, that would have been a huge cultural shock for “the brat brigade”.