Manners cost nothing, except in one Spanish restaurant

Don’t forget your manners if you want to pay the normal price.

Any long-term expat in Spain worth their salt should have enjoyed numerous smug encounters with “fresher” expats whereupon they can deliver a sermon of the dos and donts of living in this wonderful country…

An oft-heard refrain will be “Spaniards don’t really say ‘please’ or ‘thank you’, so don’t waste your breath”. Good, if not strictly accurate, advice. It is less common to hear locals utter ‘por favor’ and ‘gracias’, especially when compared to a Brit or an Irish person.

But manners DO matter in Spain. Usually in a more nuanced way, but minding one’s Ps and Qs is certainly worth remembering when dealing with Spain’s service industry. It would appear, however, that some people in Catalonia have forgotten this simple rule – prompting one café owner at a beach resort on the Costa Blanca to introduce a manners-based payment scheme.

Fed up with rushed locals and ignorant tourists eschewing good manners, the owner of the Restaurant Blau Grifeu, Marisel Valencia Madrid, charges customers €5 for those who order “un café”, while the price falls to €3 for “un café, por favor”, and a rather appealing €1.30 for “buenos dias, un café por favor”.

This little nudge, reminder, that manners cost nothing appears to be working, according to the restaurant owner. “I put a sign in the window with the price system and it has made all the difference,” Madrid told The Local. “People are now super polite in all matters, and it has really improved daily life.

“Yesterday, some children even told their parents to say please, so it’s working!” said the 41-year-old, who originally hails from Colombia. “I’m not singling out Spanish people as rude. We are just off the seafront so have a lot of tourists here as well, French, German and British, and I think generally people could just be more polite.”

Since the sign went up, Madrid has sold a grand total of zero coffees at €5, with pretty much everybody remembering their manners in order to pay the standard €1.30 sum. “Some even say thank you now, too!” she added.