Queues

Living in Argentina is experiencing the same events that the locals do and learning to shrink the divide between their reactions and your reactions. What this sounds like is cultural integration, immersion into another world. What this means in practice is getting annoyed in supermarkets and learning how to queue.

Just a few days ago, I experienced the former. Having picked a time to go to the supermarket that ensured I would not run into the heaving commuter mob (most weekdays, 6-9 pm) or the shuffling OAPs (bizarrely, Monday and Wednesday from 10 am-2 pm), I neatly traversed the aisles at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon, snatching the few items I needed and choosing a queue that was moving quite quickly. The woman in front of us was the only thing that stood between us and an entirely efficient, successful and rapid shopping trip. I mentally winked at cultural integration.

However, everything quickly unraveled. The woman in front of us, I noticed casually, had no items. All she had was a bill. It turned out that she was paying her supermarket credit card bill. Great, she has the cash, she’ll cough up, we’ll move along. But something was wrong. Things had slowed down. I was near and nosy enough to see how much she owed, a cool $650 in the local currency, and worryingly she was tipping out the contents of her handbag. It turned out that she was short – by $1.50. Not $150, but 1 peso 50 centavos.

The system ground to a halt. Both the woman in question and the teller recognized the folly of the issue, the woman pleading slightly while the teller looked around nervously for someone to pass the buck to. There was nobody. Eventually, a superior arrived. Her blank stares were not encouraging. Behind us, the queue stretched down the aisle and even into the cold meats and cheese section. A crescendo of mutterings began in the docile supermarket. The staff started to look worried. Mutiny was just around the corner.

The problem was fixed in the end, sort of. The woman escaped, never looking back, her shoulders shuddering with what we knew was shame. We had been in the queue for twenty-five minutes. Therein lies the issue: we were all in the same queue, all consumers, all with better things to do, all aware that all she needed was $1.50 – but did we lend her the cash to speed her on her way and make it easier for ourselves? Did we heck. The steely silence of the supermarket at 5:30 pm on a Friday resounded with the thought: this is your problem, you fix it.

This Argentine trait, the grim determination to let individuals struggle in front of our eyes, is neatly juxtaposed by the grim determination to recognize when we are being manipulated but to let it occur regardless. To illustrate this second trait, I present you with Exhibit B: the SUBE card.

When I arrived most recently in BA, in 2008, there was an extreme coin shortage. For a society whose public transport depended on coins, from $1.10 for a subway (Subte) trip to the bizarre 80 cents for a bus trip, a dearth of coins was little short of disastrous. A colleague, also a foreigner, kept a certain amount of coins in the third desk of his drawer at work. I’m not exactly sure how many coins he had, but it cannot have been much less than $200 worth. You can tell that society is in trouble when the $1 coin is much more valuable than the $2 note.

The powers that be reacted slowly to this situation. Rumours of money-laundering or coin smuggling rings with government ties abounded. However, by 2010 a solution had been identified and was created: first, the Monedero card, which allowed Subte users to purchase tickets in advance, and then the SUBE card, for both the Subte and buses.

The original concept was straightforward: if you want to make things easier for yourself, you buy the card. The majority of people actually purchased SUBE with this in mind. The commute became easier, coins almost obsolete.

However, at the end of 2011, with the ‘voluntary’ renouncement of subsidies on utilities, it became clear that public transport was going to get the same treatment. In January, a vague announcement from the Transport Secretary suggested that by February 9, all subsidies would be removed and the prices increased dramatically on public transport. He did not specify by how much, nor did he have to. The only way to keep receiving the subsidized prices was through using a SUBE card.

Widespread panic ensued. Everyone had to get hold of a SUBE card. Temporary outposts were established across the city, with consumers queuing to get their hands on a SUBE by February 9. January, of course, is the hottest month in Argentina, and one would have to queue for at least one hour in the heat.

With a nation’s desperation to queue becoming apparent once again, at no point did anybody stop to ask: by exactly how much is public transport going to rise? The City government already raised the Subte price by 125% to the whopping $2.25; many worried that the same would be true for the bus. However, no details were given. The people of Buenos Aires queued, because they had been told they had to, without total justification.

As the deadline neared, the inevitable happened: the Transport Secretary announced that it had been extended by one month. Data on the actual increase was still unavailable, but the Secretary promised that it would be made clear “some days before the subsidies are removed.” Forgive me for casting aspersions, but it appears that this government regulation is being made up on the spot.

There is another slightly unnerving aspect to the SUBE issue. In order to receive a card, you have to give your DNI or passport number. The positive is that only you can use the card, and that if it is lost it is easily replaceable. The less attractive part, which has been suggested recently by government sources and the Transport Secretary himself, is that once the subsidies have been removed, the administration has considered determining how much we pay for public transport based on our income.

I’m not sure which aspect is more disturbing: that the government could track my movements through public transport or that it could determine how much I pay for a (fairly average) service based on how much I earn. The implications are not good.

However, as a society, there is no opposition here; just a mad rush to queue in the impossible heat so as not to get caught out when an unspecified change is implemented. We move like sheep, to the beat of a drum that we can hear but not see, but we have no choice. If we want to participate in this world, we have to play by its rules; that is true cultural immersion.