One year has nearly elapsed once again. For me it has also been a year since I visited Latvia. Technically speaking Latvia is merely a destination whenever I visit my relatives as this country is bizarre at so many levels that events such as Christmas can only convince me to come here. Obviously good reasons can outweight the bad ones

During my holidays I was on the hunt for some shoes I specifically needed for one occasion so didn’t want to spend much money for them and had a chance to visit handful of shops. One of the scapegoats was actually a small food shop so maybe the problem is widespread everywhere. I noticed that all shops were overstaffed and staff were standing around, talking with each other and were so busy doing so that they didn’t look too approachable in case if customer needed something. You would probably disturb them LOL. The first shop selling clothes was probably in the size of two typical living rooms (by the way located in flat converted to commercial premises) and had two ladies working on the floor. Both were having some non-work related chat and body language was clearly telling that you are not welcome in their circle. Now I’m even wondering what is their purpose at all and what kind of idiot owns this shop. Picking clothes can be done on self-serving basis, you don’t need two people watching over you all the time and what questions you might ask them (they don’t even have warehouse somewhere at the back which would store different size apparel which would require shop assistant to fetch it from there). Everything they have is up there on shop-floor. Upon exiting the shop one of the ladies even tried to pull a nice marketing stunt on me by shouting “70% off!!”. Thank you for taking time off your chat and telling me that! Maybe they should just get speakers and play the same on repeat. Second shop was even worse. Size probably the same but with three ladies! Two again having a busy conversation, third one was standing at the till but was dormant as well. Case with food shop was that they had 4 shop assistants probably a few meters apart from each other and obviously didn’t have enough customers to keep busy. Shop was terribly planed out because merchandise was barred from customers with very long counter so you had to ask them to give you what you wanted. Can anyone tell what was in shop owner’s mind when he made this up? In my opinion there should be one employee instead of these four ones - cashier! And even that one would have to clean floors up when there is nothing to do otherwise they all look like dumbstruck idiots when seeing one customer every 10 minutes. It brings me to conclusions of why this country can’t get rid of poverty. In real terms Latvia hasn’t upped median income a lot during last years. Money was spent and masses improved their conditions (enjoyed until inflation caught up) however it was owned by somebody else and things are returning to where they actually belong now as without external loans this country has slipped back to some 2004 levels when we just joined EU. And this is happening while we have one of the worst economic depressions in the world. Instead of making people redundant and looking for ways to get remaining ones to do more, majority chooses to cut salaries and this will leave a major impact on how much people will earn in the future as fundamentally no changes are introduced in the way how government and private establishments are doing their work. Unless Latvians are attracted to poverty permanently as sadists are to pain this looks like a pattern of stupid person who once again does the same thing with expectation to achieve different result.