Anti-foreigner sentiment increasing because of seriously petty disputes

In the day of rage-bait with internet postings as well as the love/hate relationship that the Thai tourism industry has with foreigners, it seems as though almost anything can end up making a big splash as far as public opinion towards farangs (foreigners) in Thailand are concerned.

This seems to be a rather nasty trend at the moment because every time I look at the English language online newspaper there are a big slew of stories about foreigners behaving badly over increasingly petty things.

Recently a foreign women refused to pay for an 80 Baht portion of her bill because after consuming it, claimed that one of her drinks was not up to her standards. 80 Baht is less than $3.

When the staff informed her of the very true policy of how unpaid items have to be paid for out of the pockets of the servers (who do not make very good wages anyway) this didn't matter to the woman and she left the restaurant while short-changing the total bill.

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_{my Thai reading skills are not very good but that says "mai aroy" in Thai which means "not tasty".}

This incident happened in Phuket, which is a hotbed of anti-foreigner sentiment even though that island has very little in the way of industry outside of tourism. It is also horrendously over-populated and I recommend against traveling there btw.

These stories really shouldn't make the news as big as they do because there are "Karen" stories all over the world and Thai people do this to other Thai people all the time as well. There are plenty of Karens in any nationality.

This is a rather awful trend at the moment because little things like this can lead to a rather large over-reaction on the part of the public as well as politicians who will often have a knee-jerk reaction that results in unnecessary violence or sweeping changes in things like Immigration policy.

Tensions are rather high right now and as I mentioned in a previous article embassies are starting to plead with their citizens to behave themselves while visiting Thailand.

This is something that I think most people just do by default but there seems to be a bunch of people that struggle with the notion of being polite. I have received many drinks and foods that I was not 100% satisfied with but I just pay for them anyway and simply don't return to the restaurant in question.

That is what this woman should have done.

The real issue here though is that people have a tendency to over-react to small stories of rather low consequence and turn this into an us vs. them sort of situation that only ends up harming everyone in the end. Thailand is extremely dependent upon tourism and they do not get to pick and choose who those "customers" are going to be. The government has tried in many ways to only get "quality tourists" and these policies have always backfired to the point where Thailand is no longer the number 1 destination for tourism in South East Asia anymore.

This trend of finding fault in foreign behavior and then blowing it up on the internet isn't going to have a good end result.

It would be nice if everyone would just behave themselves sure, but making a mountain out of a molehill isn't going to work out for anyone in the end.