I attended a wedding banquet of an old friend last weekend at one of the 5 star hotel in singapore. It was a relatively low key affair, small ballroom of about 18 tables. Everything was nicely prepared, from cocktail reception to stage to dinner, just what you would expect from a 5 star hotel.

I observed something interesting during the entire dinner. Starting from the cocktail reception, I noticed that almost all the servers are non-singaporeans. I said almost all because I didn't managed to ask all of them, but I spoke to at least up to 10 of them, and none of them answered me in a Singaporean accent. Nothing against them at all, they did provide a wonderful dining experience, and to their credit, a good many of them spoke pretty decent english. By decent I mean I can understand them or that they can understand me by repeating less than 3 times, without wild gesturing and without having speaking to another staff. Yeah, my expectations of decent has really dropped way way down.

I remembered when I was younger, one of the better paying jobs for a teenager is serving at these banquets. If I remembered correctly, it paid about $8 - $12 per hour for a part-timer, and about $1500 - $2000 for a full timer. That was more than 10 years ago though, but for a teenager, and for a lot of semi-retirees, that was pretty decent income. Sadly, I saw none of either lately. I wonder if teenagers these days still do holiday/part-time work? Other than at fast food restaurants, I don't think I've seen them anywhere else. Used to be I see alot of them, especially during the school holidays, especially at banquets, restaurants, retail outlets etc. Nowadays, all I see are foreigners.

Just yesterday, I went shopping at Raffles City. Almost all the shops that I went to are manned by foreigners. I was buying a pair of shoes and I chose a pair and went to the counter for payment. The cashier was a Filipino lady (all smiles and credit to her) and asked for help with her colleague to get a new pair (in english). Her colleague responded to her in mandarin and after some gesturing, I decided to step in to help with the interpretation. I wonder in bemusement initally, why the store manager choose to place just the two of them in the store when they obviously had trouble communicating with each other. Then I realised that its actually a damn smart move. These foreigners obviously work at a local cost to the locals so the store save more and earn more. Being unable to communicate makes them being unable to stand around gossiping and thus focus on working. The Filipino serve all the english speaking customers and the Chinese to serve all the mandarin speaking ones, which basically covers majority of the demographics of the people who shop there.

Smart move to make best use of resources.