A common oddity in German[y] is the use of phrases like “Kundenberater” (“customer consultant”) for what amounts to a salesman in a store, with the fiction that the customer is given deep and competent advice, which, unsurprisingly, is rarely actually the case. Ditto “Bankberater” (“bank consultant”), which often amounts to someone who tries to talk bank customers into investment schemes that give the bank the maximum profit. Ditto some other variations on the “-berater” theme. Some discussion of specifically Kundenberater and issues around them follows.
The typical problems are by no means limited to Germany, but the language issue is, at least, unusually large here.
The word “Berater” (as the second component of “Kundenberater”) is typically, especially in a business context, seen as “consultant” (e.g. “IT-Berater” -> “IT consultant”); however, can also mean “advisor”. Also note “Beratung” for “consulting”.
For idiomatic translations (of a similar nature), I am hampered by my low in-person exposure to U.S./U.K./whatnot stores, where fiction has mostly left me with “salesman”, “sales clerk”, “shop girl”, and similar. Looking on the Internet, I find suggested translations for “Kundenberater” that do include the likes of “customer consultant”, but I am uncertain whether this is just a crude literal translation or whether such expressions are in common use among native speakers of English and/or in the self-presentation of various stores.
Consider my recent (February 2025) visit to a small store in Barmen. Spending some fifteen minutes looking through it, I was addressed on at least three separate occasions by a saleswoman, who seemed to wish to turn my browsing into a conversation-for-the-purpose-of-selling-me-something. This included the claim that this store was a “Beratungsgeschäft” (followed by something in the “I’m here to help” family), which sounded very odd in my ears. Yes, “Geschäft” often translates as “store” and the intended-by-her interpretation is not inconceivable—just like an English speaker might hear “consulting business” and land at the right conclusion in the context of a physical business/store. However, the word “Beratungsgeschäft” (and, m.m., many other words ending with “-geschäft”) is usually taken to imply consulting as a field of business or something broadly related. This is, then, something associated with the likes of Accenture—not small stores in small towns. To boot, the word (when applied to stores) appears quite awkward in my ears.
In all fairness, I am not aware of any other specific term to bring across the intended meaning and would likely resort to some ad-hoc description, were I tasked with characterizing such a store.
A potential (and potentially more productive) angle, might be to look at the degree that self-service, in an extended sense, is wanted, tolerated, discouraged, or outright forbidden in any given store. Consider this store, the e-reader situation further down, and the common attempts to engage the customers in sales-talk or, even, small-talk as soon as humanly possible. (Note that “forbidden” actually can be legitimate, say, in a store that deals with very rare, very fragile, and/or very easily stolen objects—but for reasons unrelated to “Kundenberatung”.)
Likewise, a “high end”/“low end”, “high markup”/“low markup”, whatnot approach might be more helpful than one focused on presence/absence of “Beratung”.
Looking at the store as such, it dealt broadly with household goods, over a wide range that included both eating utensils and vacuum cleaners, which makes me doubt that the woman at hand would have been capable of giving me meaningful advice (had I sought it) on the full range—and even less when compared to what can be found on the Internet by a user with a smartphone who strolls through a non-“Beratungsgeschäft”. (In contrast, great expertise can be present in a store with a sufficiently narrow specialization or where, unlike here, there are specialists manning different sections of a store.)
I did ask her a question about a vacuum cleaner and received a vague and noncommittal answer that did not increase my confidence. Written information (brochure/pamphlet/whatnot) was not available, she regretted, and she referred me to the Internet for more information. Some consulting.
Throughout the course of my visit, there were three persons in the store—and only one (yours truly) was a potential customer. The other two were the aforementioned woman and a man who was performing stocking or some similar task(s). Revenue? Nothing, as I left without a purchase.
This need, of course, not reflect the typical state of the store, but it is a strong pointer that the store did not earn money through a great number of purchases. (Other stores in the vicinity were by no means empty at the time.) The suspicion, then, is that the price per product or per sale is what keeps revenue up—and the prices were indeed quite high. In a next step, we land at the suspicion that the point of the store was not so much “Beratung” as high-end sales, which are more likely to take place when the customer is distracted and manipulated by the staff.
The differentiation “per product or per sale” does not change the big picture, but can be important in other contexts. We might e.g. have one store that pre-dominantly earns money on individual items with a high profit per item and another that does so by selling large quantities to individual customers. (Consider “wedding china”. Of course, even the latter will typically strive for a high profit per item.) This can also have an effect on the details of how a store is run, e.g. in that the customers of the former might tend to just drop by, while those of the latter might typically make an appointment.
While I cannot speak in detail for the store and woman at hand in this regard, my experiences with “Kundenberater” have not been positive. More often than not, they are not very knowledgable; almost invariably, they tell the customer what (they think that) he wants to hear, so that he is pushed towards buying—even should what is told not match reality. Their expertise tends to be with sales—not the products.
At an extreme, I once overheard a salesman proudly, emphatically, and with great certainty tell a customer that the TSA-locks on the various bags that he was selling were perfectly safe, because only the TSA would have the universal key—while such keys had already long been leaked onto the Internet, with convenient 3D-printer files available for low-effort/-cost creation.
Or consider a purchase of an e-reader: I had made a reasonable pre-filtering on the Internet, looked at what was available in the store (likely, a Saturn), and tried to pick up one to bring to the check-out. Despite that objects of a similar size and price are usually present in stores and in a manner that allows “self-service”, the only specimens available where those chained to the display shelf. When I inquired, I was told that I had to speak to a “Kundenberater”. After some waiting, one them deigned to grace me with his presence—and immediately began to push for the purchase of a reading light and additional insurance, both of which, apparently, were direly needed for the main purchase to be worthwhile. (But none of which interested me in the slightest and both of which I turned down emphatically.) Only after this did he actually go to fetch the product from storage. Here, the “Kundenberater” had the sole purpose of up- and/or cross-selling, forced upon the customer by the artificial absence of merchandise in (the public areas of) the store. Had I come unprepared and technically naive, and had I asked for the “consulting” services of a “Kundenberater”, it is a near given that he would also have tried to trick me into buying something more expensive than made sense from my point of view—but which might have earned him a larger commission. Even as is, I might have lost some ten minutes of my time compared to a scenario where I just grabbed the right e-reader and walked to the check-out.
Speaking of commissions: Someone has to pay for the additional overhead of the “Kundenberater”, including commissions, the (typically) higher or much higher ratio of staff to customers, and what else might apply, relative a “regular” store. At the end of the day, the cost lands on the heads of the customers, who effectively pay a premium for (the very often) misleading and manipulative claims, which leads them to worse purchasing decisions than they would have made without “Beratung”.
As with politics, what might nominally be free actually has to be paid by someone, even down to complementary cups of coffee—never mind the many stores where “Kundenberater” often stand around rolling their thumbs because there are more of them than there are customers.
With politics, it is the people; with stores, it is the customers.
And speaking of lost time: If and when a customer does agree to talk to a “Kundenberater” prematurely, it usually results in a loss of time, because such talks tend not to be very productive. (A non-premature case is when a customer has an intent to buy, has done his browsing and other preliminaries, and now wants assistance to narrow a shortlist of candidates down to one.) Indeed, even a rejected approach can waste time, bring the customer out of a train of thought, or otherwise be harmful, even be it in a lesser manner. I have, at an extreme, experienced a few cases where I stepped into a store to just give it a brief inspection, to see whether it was a viable candidate store with an eye at what was at offer at what price compared to other potential candidate stores—only to be immediately set upon by some “Kundenberater” who wanted to talk or, worse, go into the details of some specific product. (In particular, when it comes to kitchens, big appliances, and similar.) Going into such details, however, brings me nothing, it is contrary to the purpose of such a visit, and, if anything, it will lower my interest in the store.
As advice to customers respectively stores and the members of its sales staff:
Avoid stores that have more staff than customers on the premisses and stores that aggressively try to engage with the customers.
Do not approach customers but let the customers approach you, if and when they want to engage. An exception is when a customer appears too shy to call for assistance (a problem that, apparently, some women have) and has spent considerable time in the store.
An interesting point is that the combination of too much staff and a commission system almost necessarily leads to too many pre-mature approaches—and often to the disadvantage of the store: If (!) a sale takes place, this sale will usually go to whoever manages a successful first approach, which implies that not approaching now gives someone else the chance to be first, which implies that approaching might be preferable to not approaching (commission-wise), even should it harm the overall chances of a sale taking place.
However, I have also encountered quite a few approaches where no such mechanism is likely to be present and where it might be that someone has a mistaken (but well-meaning) sense of what is customer friendliness or might approach for purposes like killing time on a day when nothing happens or being seen as “working”, rather than just standing around. For instance, there was a Cologne bookstore in which I was approached on virtually every visit by the same man, with some variation of “Can I assist you?”, when I looked at a specific section of books—while approaches from others and/or in other sections were rare and while a commission was hardly an issue. (Even if one had been given, which borders on the ridiculous, the amount per book would have been quite small.)