German Consumers Not Taking It Anymore Fed-Up Public Tuning In For Assertiveness Training

With names like “That’s Enough Now!” and “Not With Me!” some of the newest German TV shows sound more like assertiveness training than prime-time entertainment.

Yet Germans, fed up with their country’s infamously poor service and choking bureaucracy, are tuning in by the millions to consumer-oriented shows that give the little guy a chance to fight back.

“Maybe it says something about how Germans like to complain,” says Sabine Dooremans, publicist for “How’s That, Please?!” the oldest, most successful of the shows. “Or maybe it’s a change, that they are waking up and not so easily pushed around.”

Take Irene Theiss, a young unemployed Berliner who spent $2,200 for a 1988 Peugot, only to have the steering go out the next day. The car had just passed a mandatory inspection.

“How can such things happen?” the demure woman asks a concerned Vera Int-Veen, self-described “powerfrau” and host of “That’s Enough Now! - The Show on Your Side.”

“What would have happened if I had been on the autobahn?”

Cue the Rocky-style music with its chorus of “Face to face.” A board member of the inspection firm enters the studio through clouds of dry ice fog and blitzing lights.

“A mistake was made,” he says, to hearty audience applause.

“I think it’s good that you admit that,” Int-Veen says. “Not everyone does.”

The company rep agrees to reimburse the $900 Theiss spent fixing the steering, everyone is happy, and it’s on to the next case.

Bernd Brockhoff, a top official at the umbrella group for Germany’s 37 consumer protection agencies, ascribes the new TV trend to a growing public interest in consumer affairs.

Germans, among the world’s top travelers, have discovered that shopping can be easy and pleasant elsewhere in Europe, and especially in the United States.

“They see there that there can be better service and another way of giving such services,” Brockhoff said.

He points to last year’s fight over extending store hours as an example of how far Germany has yet to go. Despite heated union opposition, the government passed a long-debated law allowing stores to stay open an extra 90 minutes - till 8 p.m. - weekdays and another two hours - till 4 p.m. - on Saturdays.

But while consumers are happier, he said, reports are coming in that clerks, angered by longer work hours, are getting surlier.

“If you come to a shop at 7:30 (p.m.) today, you don’t get good advice,” he said. “The tradition of 40 years will disappear, I think, only in the next 10 years, not earlier.”

Frustration over this and other less-than-adequate service is evident in the shows’ popularity.

On the air for five years, “How’s That Please?!” still gets 8,000 letters a week, said show spokeswoman Anja Laufs. It finishes in the top 10 each Saturday night, averaging about 4 million viewers.

“That’s Enough Now!” and “Not With Me!” air Wednesday nights on competing networks. Both premiered last month and already draw nearly 3 million viewers each. A fourth, “Without Guarantee,” airs once a month, but producers hope to be picked up by the country’s biggest public network.

“You’d think that the cases would run out sometime,” Laufs said. “But again and again unbelievable, funny things happen.”