Sorry to say but I hope only in Finland...

I tried to check if I've complained about this also earlier but I couldn't find it. Hence even more important to say what I think. Just like I told the staff that was not focused on serving customers = selling more = doing the job they were hired for.

I was today in a ice hockey game of my home team, Espoo Blues. As some of you know, they play 3 times 20 minutes where the clock is stopped when the game stops (different from soccer). That makes the game lasts normally a bit over 2 hours.

What do you think happens when the first 20 minutes is played and you have 15 minutes (I think it is not more in Finland, didn't pay attention...)?

Well, I can tell you that most of the people want to go and buy something; beer, soda, hot dog, hamburgar, crisps/chips etc.

In my business thinking it would be wise to make sure I have a proper number of hands to make sure these are sold in the fairly short time period, since if there are queues many leave the money in their pockets.

HOW THE HELL CAN THIS BE POSSIBLE:
In a "club" section for season ticket spectators (in Finnish league there are not too many of them) there is a nice, fancy 15 meters long bar and some hundreds of people. When the 15 minutes start, there is one (1), yes I mean one single person, at the bar. In seconds after the buzzer there is a queue of 10s of people.

What do I do after wondering this and seeing one lady clearing glasses at the end of bar and another doing whatevershewasdoingwithoutpayingattentiontothecustomers? Of course I go to these ladies and ask if they really plan to serve the customers with only one person. Well, they were looking at me like I was a 2-headed frog from Tsernobyl - and continued whatevertheyweredoing...

Unfortunately it was not the first time in this arena. Too bad I was with a guy who is responsible for next partner negotiations of one of Blues main sponsors. I was biting my tongue and he was the first to say out loud what we both thought about the damn queue vs business.

Now I remember!
It was in the Finland - Hungary football game where almost a similar thing happened. But this one was worse as tonight they had the potential to serve more. In the football game there was just too few salespeople.

It was towards the end of this blog posting where I complained about the lack of business sense.

What about the game then?
My team Blues played most of time fun, enjoyable hockey and was able to push the game to the enemy goal but they seemed to be avoiding shooting for some reason. The enemy, Porin Ässät - Aces from Pori (the Jazz town) - took twice the lead with similar 1-1 vs goalie from left side -goals but Blues came back both times, also with similar goals from a bit of a traffic jam.

Game goes to overtime, puck in Blues end and all of a sudden the puck is in a wrong net.

Well, Blues got at least the one point but Ässät 2 points that most likely made the >3 hour return bus trip a bit smoother...

C'mon Blues, step up the game winning touch and you will go far this year!