Of hawkers, whining and foreign talent

It is funny how the mind works. I cannot pretend to fathom how my own brain works, much less say I understand others'. In the short span of 15 minutes I was at a coffeeshop (a coffeeshop is different from a hawker centre, but any Singaporean would know that) having my lunch, I had formulated this post in my mind's eye.

I had noticed a bunch of hawkers grouped together at a table, and gossiping. Although I cannot say I heard their words, but through their gestures and glances, I quickly began to realize that it was directed at their more successful neighbour - Botak Jones.

Before we begin, let me give some background on this outfit Botak Jones (BJ). It started off as one outlet in Tuas, or so I heard from my brother's friend (should be accurate). That one is reputed to serve the best BJ food. The other outlets, I heard, cannot compare, somehowthe original is still best. (I've had the chance to dine at the Clementi outlet - the Cajun Chicken is not bad - but this post is not about food.) I think the idea of this BJ chain is to serve great Western food at "affordable" prices. Their prices are not hawker standard, but again, this post is not about food prices or quality. BJ has quite successfully infiltrated the coffeeshops they set up at, as evidenced by the crowds that throng these eateries AFTER they set up shop there. And it must be mentioned that most of these people eat from the BJ shop rather than the other hawkers.


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Now, picture this situation. You're an old-time hawker, having seen the setting up of this coffeeshop when it was still a venture between two old and balding men, rather than big coffeshop chains like S11 or Kopitiam. Now, the coffeeshop's revamped by one of these big coffeeshop chains, and then they bring in Botak Jones.

You laugh, thinking it must be one those ambitious entrepreneurships trying to make it big. Just another one of them, doomed to failure within... 3 months, you calculate with your fingertips. Then you go about your business, selling fishball noodles. You steal another glance at the stall, and get stumped. WOAH, is that $7.60 for a set of fish and chips? IN A COFFEESHOP!? Hahahaha... you recalculate with your fingertips, this time, you estimate that they will pack up and go within one and a half months. Nobody with half a brain would choose to eat there, after all people come to coffeeshops for CHEAP food. And of course, your fishball noodles has been the traditional crowd-puller. You go back to cooking food for that nasty customer who's yelling away. Secretly you wish to slap that guy's face, and when he shouts again, you tell him to "go eat at Botak Jones lah! Don't come back! Don't need your business!"

Within 1 month, your business is down 30% (no, it's nothing to do with that previous incident). The crowds prefer to eat at BJ, somehow. You begin fretting, but then you've seen many new shops open and suffered temporary loss of business before the novelty factor wore off and the new hawkers began to pack up and leave for a "better location". So this must be another trying period for you, but it's going to pass. No worries.

The next month, your business nosedives to 50% of the pre-BJ era. Now you start worrying. Weren't they supposed to ship out after one and a half months? And now they're not just going strong, they're growing stronger! The novelty factor is supposed to last all of a month only, wasn't it?

3 months since, your business remains dismal. Lunch hour comes and goes, it used to be hell for you, but now you're sitting at a table, shooing houseflies from your leftover ingredients from last week. Shit.

4 months pass. You start to get really angry about this BJ outlet. You secretly harbour thoughts of razing their stall to the ground, but of course you're more rational than that. You bitch about them to the next stall owner. "Look at them, they think they're so great cos they sell Western food. Please lah, Singaporeans where got so stupid like to eat Western food one. They still prefer the traditional food like laksa and chicken rice mah. How come all our business like that? Must be that stupid Botak Jones lah. Come and ji siao."
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I can imagine that was what happened. Anyway I believe it's been more than four months since BJ set up in my area, and a lot of these old time hawkers are getting really frustrated with them for snatching otherwise what would have been their business.

But from a neutral standpoint, I should say the increased business at the coffeeshop was in no small part due to BJ. And I shall use this example as part of bigger concepts - the foreign talent policy (see my previous article on the same topic) and the typical Singapore mindset to whine and complain (I'll talk about both in simultaneity.)

BJ can be seen as the foreign talent imported by say, Kopitiam, to improve their business. After all we know that Kopitiam is a business outfit driven by profit, and the way it functions is not unlike our government, who operates Singapore Inc. in a similar fashion. So of course, somehow, by means of some magical formulae or pure luck, Kopitiam hit on their jackpot, more people eat at the coffeeshop and handsome returns come flushing into their coffers. Very similar to Singapore Inc.'s reliance on foreign talents who create jobs for our locals and at the same time getting our own national coffers flushed with surpluses.

But see, the other hawkers are not happy. Yes, more people eat at the coffeeshop, but the influx of the new customers go to BJ! They don't really notice that they have new customers coming to their stalls too, because now their old customers eat at BJ (the stall which disgusts them to no end not least cos of their huge servings of fries which always seem to be unfinished.) Their business is down, but instead of seeking to innovate, how to improve themselves, they just sit around, mope, gripe and reminisce about the pre-foreign talent era.

One hawker recently came up to my friends and me one day and whilst serving me my food, started to gripe to us about Botak Jones! He asked my friends sarcastically if they were getting food from BJ. One of them was, and he said so. Then the hawker went on to tell us a long story, about how he'd been there for a long time, that BJ was unhealthy, that the waiting times for their food was unreasonable, that the prices were crazy. By comparison, his fish bee hoon was the healthier choice (bah!), cheaper, and in the time my friend was going to get his western food serving, I was going to finish my bowl of noodles, walk one big round around the neighbourhood, and then come back to see... that my friend hadn't gotten his food yet (yes the hawker said all of that.) It wasn't like he knew or could reasonably expect my friend to drop his BJ order and immediately order from him, but he said it anyway. Kept coming back to make snide remarks, and, brought up by our parents NOT to be rude to the older generation, we could only nod and smile in silence, and pray that he would get the hint we were not interested in hearing him talk.

Yes, I know, I'm still young. I might not know as much about what goes on in the working world yet, cos I haven't started working. I would be the first to admit too, that I've had a very sheltered environment, being in all the, for lack of a better phrase, non-neighbourhood schools. But I make an effort to mix around with the neighbourhood school people, and I do not find that a chore. In fact, my life revolves about people and making friends. I do not see the people who did not go to elite schools as inferior. In fact, I'd say most are much better than me in EQ and people relationships when I was younger, especially when I was in secondary school and did not mix around much. So please, I do not see myself as part of the elite, nor am I elitist. (This paragraph is to pre-empt people who might offer dumb comments about me - please do not get personal.)

I think whining and complaining are both things which come naturally to us. It in itself is fine. I engage in whining too. But to rely on the government for everything and anything is becoming a chilling prelude to where our future is headed. I believe, as do many of my European friends that the Singapore CPF system is one of the best systems in the world. You reap what you sow, what is so wrong with that? If you choose to give private tuition, or set up your own business, and in both circumstances not contribute to CPF, then it's your choice too, and it's your fault if anything goes wrong later on, right? True, the government should provide some sort of social security, but too much of it provides for a crutch mentality in all Singaporeans.

I forget when the cash handouts started, prolly when GST was first introduced in Singapore, but since then we've almost begun to take it like a given. There're so many of these schemes that I've forgotten all their names, I just remember that the government's giving me money and that I've a bonus over my female counterparts cos I've done NS and they haven't. When the government started giving out cash handouts to ALL Singaporeans, they might not have anticipated the turn in tide of public thinking. It was all cosy in the beginning of course. Everyone appreciates spare cash.

But soon enough, the Government got so caught up with this that they conveniently ignored the fact that they did NOT want Singaporeans to rely on the Government! But slowly and gradually, it became such. You laugh, you think it's nonsensical, but you judge for yourself when you look at the deluge of extremely humourous articles in the Humour section of our States Times Straits Times. Oops, sorry my bad, it's the Forum Pages.

A ST forum article, which happened to be the centrepiece for Piper's article about a father writing in to gripe his daughter's inability to get into a local university despite her grades - A, B, E, made for good lunchtime fodder. A and B aside, what about the E she got? And I think it made perfect sense to read the fineprint in the university handbook that was given to most aspiring undergrads who bothered to turn up at the annual Open House - that meeting the minimum criteria would NOT guarantee admission into the university. I do not think an open admission policy would be in the sights of NUS/NTU/SMU, who are all so caught up with the rankings in the international arena that the last thing they need is a perceived drop in standards of entrance criteria and correspondingly the university's "exclusivity" and reputation. With UNSW Asia's pullout of Singapore, and other foreign institutions' unwillingness to move in as yet, Mr See's daughter would have to try her luck elsewhere.

Last time, in my parents' generation Eh my bad, just some four years back(!), if I couldn't make it to university, it was my fault that I wasn't good enough. Nowadays, if you can't make it to university, you ask your dad to write a letter to the Forum pages (letting people have a good laugh about it in the process must be a bonus.)

Maybe in some part due to Singaporeans nowadays being better educated and as such being more vocal, they start to articulate issues which might have been their own personal grudges last time. True, See Jr's grades of A, B, E and a C for GP are reasonably good, but it's not like they're terribly good that a university would be damned not to accept her. Blame it on luck, blame it on herself. By no means the system is perfect, the net might not have been woven tight enough to catch all the capable people and not let anyone fall through. Whining, if done correctly, can cause the system to improve, but the truth hurts - not many people engage in constructive whining.

Wang Hongjun, in his letter to the ST Forum, laments the participation of our youth in their own business. In his letter, aptly titled "Why are students not writing in themselves?", he claims he is surprised to see parents writing in for their children when the matters at hand are clearly the problems of the children. Add that to the fact that these very children we speak of are not primary school going age, but rather aspiring to go to the university! Have their linguistic ability failed them? Or are they used to having their parents write parents' letters for them in primary, secondary school and even junior college? Stressed Teacher wrote about this topic before - a very interesting phenomenon indeed, although by no means new.

My whole point here is that, many Singaporeans have become sucked into a vacuum of mollycuddling by the government. We need to get out of this vicious cycle and once again learn to stand on our own two feet.


P.S.: I'm not sure if hawkers can opt to sell anything they want or change the food they cook (if they don't have that liberty, then maybe the fault's not really theirs), especially in the setting of a coffeeshop. But then they could ask for a switch? Or somehow improve their cooking, come up with other gimmicks, team up with other hawkers, come up with discount schemes? I dunno, but many of them are the older generation, haven't had the benefit of a tertiary marketing education. Tough luck.