"The Rudest and Most Polite Cities in the World"
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 October 18, 2007
From Thailand to Finland, from Buenos Aires to London, people worry courtesy is becoming a thing of the past. Service in stores has become surly, they say, and youngsters have lost respect for their elders.
Reader's Digest sent out undercover reporters - half of them men, half women - to 35 countries to assess the citizens of some of the world's biggest cities. In each location they conducted three tests:
1) Walking into public buildings 20 times behind people to see if they would hold the door open for us.
2) Buying small items from 20 stores and recorded whether the sales assistants said thank you.
3) Dropping a folder full of papers in 20 busy locations to see if anyone would help pick them up.
To allow RD to compare cities, they awarded one point for each positive outcome and nothing for a negative one, giving each city a maximum score of 60. They did not attempt a strict scientific survey; it was the world's biggest real-life test of common courtesy, with more than 2,000 tests of actual behavior.
So, which city emerged as the most polite and which as the rudest? Here's what we discovered:
The Top Three: New York, Zurich, Toronto
The region that most consistently lacked courtesy: Asia. Eight out of nine cities there finished in the bottom 11.
Last in RD rankings was Mumbai, where courtesy in stores was particularly lacking. When a female reporter bought a pair of plastic hair clips at a convenience store, sales assistant Shivlal Kumavat turned his back on her as soon as she had paid. Asked why, the 31-year-old was unapologetic. "Madam, I am not an educated guy. I hand goods over to the customers, and that's it."
Unfortunately, the Reader's Digest survey was a bit flawed and did not take into account cultural differences. In Asia few people held doors open for their reporters: Many Asians simply don't include door-holding in their notions of courtesy. "How can we measure someone's value simply by whether they hold a door open?" observed 19-year-old student John Christopher Padilla in the Philippine capital, Manila.
A 43-year-old businesswoman, held open the door of a shop in Seoul only because "I often go overseas on work trips and it's basic manners over there. In Korea people don't pay much attention to such things."
Moscow and Bucharest ranked as the least polite cities in European countries. When an affluent-looking lady in her 40s failed to hold a door in Moscow's Prospekt Vernadskogo, she chided us: "I'm not a doorman. It's not my job to hold doors. If someone gets hurt, they should be quicker on their feet."
Excerpted from Reader's Digest.
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