Customer care in Croatia

I live in a rural area and try to use the small village and town shops as much as possible. In most of them the staff are friendly and helpful. I never cease to be amazed by how many people in Croatia speak English, even in some of the tiny village supermarkets.  In Durdevac there is one small shop that sells things for gardeners and wine makers. I went in there to get a pair of gardening gloves and could not fault them for the amount of trouble they went to to find me the perfect pair. The gloves are packed in a way that you can't try them on but they unpacked several pairs for me to try.  I found a similar level of service at an ironmongers in Klostar Podravski. The guy there speaks near perfect English and knows about all the products he sells. I tell him what I'm doing and he rummages in his Aladdin cave to find me the right parts for the job. This is very useful for me because I'm more familiar with UK materials which are often different to those used in Croatia.

I decided to add to my last post after todays shopping trip. in Durdevac. I had been having trouble topping up my new mobile phone using a VIP Bon voucher. I went to the shop I mentioned above, on the pretext of buying wine making equipment (they were not able to help much in that respect as I want to make wine on a much smaller scale, than they are used to). I did buy a few items but it only came to about 40kn. They spent about an hour trying to sort the phone problem though, including a few calls to a VIP call centre! They did solve it in the end, the default settings in my dual sim phone were preventing it from making the top up call on the correct network. I ended up feeling guilty for causing that much bother but they seemed happy to help.