Enter a new era?

It's been around 4 months that I moved into Helsinki & while the culture shock didn't actually happen for some strange reason, one point did stand out. The concept of customer service which is kind of an alien concept here. I am not sure what would be the historical reasons behind it but the maximum you can get here is a smile, a smile in return & not as the first default option.
Now having come from India, where customer service gives away to obsequiousness, this adaptation in behaviour did had some mental balancing to do. I was used to finding floor supervisors / attendants on the aisle who I could ask anything & they would have kind enough to walk with me to the place where the item was located. In Helsinki, my sensory & visual capabilities developed enough for me to be able to survive in a jungle. I could only smell & look - reading was out of the question & one would have to be really lucky to find someone who actually knew where the stuff was. Mind it, it's not that people are not helpful but they just don't know their shops well enough. After the billing is done, you pack your own stuff & then walk home. Contrast this to the ones back home,where some places even have attendants carry your bags with you to the car & then leave with a smile
Because of all this, I was amazed when I walked into Stockmann this week & saw attendants standing inthe newly renovated supermarket, offering to help people.There were goodlooking girls standing with trays of goodies ( cheese, chocolates) offering it to people who walked past. There were some people who did view them with suspicion but most of them took well. I have a feeling that the top management of Stockmann would have engaged a very expensive consultant who would have told them about this old mantra of making ur customers delighted & this must have been their way of executing it. So I could find people who directed me to the right aisles & surprise oh surprise, the lady at the counter asked me if I would like to get my purchases packed? This question drew my attention & I saw that at every cash counter, there was one person standing who was packing the purchases made by every one. Now this is where one observes carefully - The person who is packing views her job as a packing person. She is not sure whether she should be pleasant & smiling at customers who pick up their packets from her. So i observed few of those interactions, the packers had numerous kinds of reactions - some smiled hesitantly, some smiled openly, some didn't smile. It also had to do with the shoppers who were not sure if they should be thankful for this service or should they take it as an abberation.Mind it, these people would have shopping for decades & something like this would not never happened to them
So the following thoughts came to my head
1) Would the other supermarket chains take cue & copy this practise & start a concept of customer service all over Helsinki
2) It would definitely create more jobs & help the unemployment rate
3) Would this allow stores to charge more such kind of conveniences which customers in Finland would value? That also means stores not having price wars but using service as a differentiator
I would observe this trend carefully to see if this is an abberation or are we actually witnessing a slow revolution in Finland starting with one store in Helsinki?
Signing off