CLAYGO, Filipino!

            Holding your food tray, you move past a multitude of occupied tables, looking for a vacant one where you can settle and enjoy your meal. After a few more rounds, you find yourself an empty one. To your disappointment; however, the table is full of food scraps and soiled wrappers. So, you wait a little longer until a waiter comes to clean your table.

            Does this sound familiar to you? I am 99% sure that your answer would be a resounding yes. This has always been the system of Philippine fast food chains. People leave all their scrap on the table and it’s perfectly ok because doing so wouldn’t really be a violation against common courtesy. It has always been the waiters’ job to wipe the tables clean -- not the ones who actually made the mess.

            In other countries, however, let’s take for example, the United States of America, it is mandatory for costumers to clean their table before they leave. It would have been overtly rude if they were to leave their trash on the table. Technically, it’s a Your trash, your responsibility kind of thing. It is no one’s job to clean your mess for you.

            CLAYGO, or the Clean as You Go Policy, very much applies in other countries. Why then does this policy not sit very well with Filipinos?  Could it be because we have been so used to having people, whose job’s to clean our trash, that we find it difficult and, perhaps, weird, to clean the tables by ourselves? Would this behavior reveal that the middle to upper class Filipinos are already prima dona’s without them even noticing it? Taking into consideration that labor here is actually very cheap, it has been a way of life for Filipinos to hire maids and have them do all the work you tell them. This behavior is similar to how we treat table cleaners. We actually take them for granted until we realize that life wouldn’t be as convenient and as good without them. I honestly think that this mindset can be wrong and must actually be changed. It’s not always good to have people do the most menial things for you when you can actually just do them by yourself. With that, guess what we can do to start changing this mindset. CLAYGO anyone?