Thai logic – there’s no figuring it out!

Posted by admin on December 7th, 2007 filed in Bangkokians, Culture shock, Living here

Sooner or later you will have to deal with Thai logic when you live here, especially if you are closely involved with a Thai. As a Westerner, their method may well seem completely long-winded or simplistic and against practical sense but there is no pursuading them otherwise. Usually their decisions or tasks are based on an entirely different set of values and priorities, with little regard to other personal inconveniences we might take for granted.

For example, a friend of mine was lamenting recently the difficulty of running his company with his wife involved as the bookkeeper. I think she has a background of accounting and dealing with tax authorities and so on, but it sounds like many of their actions are for minimising cost and avoiding tax, which seems sensible if it is all legal, but the inconvenience causes as a result really leaves my poor friend wandering if all the effort is really worth it. He was hesitant to ask all his staff, many part timers, to open a new bank account with the same bank as his company.

The reasoning was that they could save 30 baht per inter-bank transaction when paying them each month. Well, when you are paying people 20,000 baht a month, 30 baht amounts to 0.15% of the wage, which would seem like a reasonable banking expense to be swallowed by the company. Of course, his wife sees it differently, 30 baht x 10 employees x 12 months = 3600 baht which then becomes a significant figure. But relative to the company’s turnover it represents peanuts and should simply be included as part of operating costs.This kind of small cutting of corners is typical of Thai thriftyness, while we foriegners tend to write it off and look at the bigger picture of keeping people happy.

He tried to explain to her that it was unreasonable to expect part time employees, some of which came and went within a few months, to open multiple bank accounts. As he explained to me, the cost in time of going into the bank and the fee for a new bank card, plus the wasted time and paperwork of the bank employees was far greater than the saving the company would make. But she couldn’t see the logic. As far as she was concerned they were the pay masters and it was their priviledge to inconveniece everyone for the sake of saving expenses. If they refused, she said, then they should find another job. It was, she explained, the Thai way that all companies in the country did things and employers are all used to it.

So, we have a situation where the 22 million strong work force changes bank accounts every few years in order to please their new employers. Effectively this means you have no choice in who you bank with, and the company’s choice of bank dictates who everyone banks with. Considering many of the Chinese family owned businesses traditionally remain with the ‘family friends’ bank, this becomes quite critical to the ‘democracy of banking’ in Thailand.

Well, if you are a part timer or freelancer with several jobs or paymasters, it also means you have the added inconvenience of managing several accounts, unless you want to foot the 30 baht bill and just transfer the money all into one single account, in which case the big rich companies pass the expense on to their employers.

But getting back to the paymaster’s priviledge, my friend failed to see that Thais still strongly relate to the relationship of master and servant. If your company says you must bank with their bank, then so be it. They are ‘feeding’ you so you do as they say. No one objects or points out the severe inconvenience to everyone involved, let alone the plain uncommon sense or lopsided logic of it all. So, you have a country that makes hundreds of similar decisions and unneccessary tasks every day for the sake of suiting traditional values or methods. Common sense, as we see it in the West, simply doesn’t apply here, which is why there is so much more red tape and less efficiency in so many things here. Westerners who’ve just arrived argue and try to put things right, offering logical and reasonable suggestions for improving things, but it’s completely lost on Thai people because we foreigners fail to understand the deep rooted beliefs and methods that are influencing their decisions. There’s no changing Thai logic.

Living in Bangkok