Bangkok Eats on the Street, Not at the Dinner Table

In a Bangkok mall, I saw dozens of people walking by a lost banknote without picking it up. A Thai colleague explained that according to local Buddhist culture, to appropriate something unduly is tantamount to theft, even when you can't trace the rightful owner. A similar culture fosters very low crime rates even in a city like Bangkok where poverty's hardship and ostentatious wealth live side by side.

Certain areas of the capital, with their brand-new skyscrapers, remind one of Hong Kong or Singapore; wealthy Thais like to show off their wealth by engaging in conspicuous consumption, from luxury accessories to fancy Western cars, in spite of the high tariffs levied on them. A few blocks away the poor live lives of poverty with dignity, and the two classes mix by the ubiquitous food stalls where even Lamborghinis stop by.

Thailand's official slogan is "the land of smiles" and fits well a country welcoming 20 million tourists and well-disposed toward business travelers. But the openness is on the surface. It's hard to make friends, because in Thailand business and private life seldom intersect. Thai colleagues only rarely invite you home, since this is seen as the place where you sleep, not where you live. Local employees often work late hours to avoid the hellish traffic, and thus lunch and dine outside the home. The family and the dinner as social ritual are not as central to Thai culture as they are to Italian culture, so much that a young colleague tells me that often when he comes home, his mother ships him outside right away to get some food to be consumed at home.

Since personal relations are superficial, you often lose sight of someone you like but who has changed his/her job –and this happens quite often since unemployment is less than 1% and there is an attitude to change jobs frequently for reasons we would consider trivial, as they are not linked to economic convenience and people often quit without having started to look for their next jobs.

In Bangkok, the informal sector of the economy is highly developed and allows everybody to earn something, so that poverty is widespread, but not extreme. Thanks to low wages, services are overstaffed with respect to Western standards, in offices and restaurants alike. But wages are not low enough to attract Western offshoring. With a 10-dollar minimum daily wage, Thailand's labor is significantly costlier than neighboring countries. Those foreign firms operating in the country are there to serve Thailand's domestic market. Italian presence is still limited when compared to Japan, France, Great Britain, the US or even Northern European countries, but over the last years partnerships and exchange programs have multiplied, leading to several Italians getting jobs here. Italian companies are still benefiting from Thailand's growing market, but Italian brands are already well known, so now the problem is to fend off the growing competition.

Elia Righetti, an economics and management graduate (2009), is chapter leader of the Bocconi Alumni Association in Bangkok. He stayed in the Thai capital as a student in 2008, when he took part in a semester-long exchange program with Chulalongkorn University. After graduating he went back. He worked in consulting and for the Italian-Thai Chamber of Commerce, where today he's the local coordinator of a EU-sponsored project, while he still provides assistance and expertise to Italian companies wanting to sell to Thai consumers.