[Tango-L] marketing survey

[Brick Robbins]

Ming Mar <ming_mar at yahoo.com> asked:
>I have a question for people who also do other dances:  Are
>the non-tango people nicer than tango people?

In a short word: Yes.

Longer explanation:
First off, I am a formally trained ballroom teacher who doesn't teach
or dance ballroom much since I drank the Tango Kool-Aid.

In the USA, at least, the dance codigos were intentionally structured
to make dance more welcoming to beginners. A huge amount of this can
be traced back to the Fred Astaire and Aurthur Murray dance school
franchises. Americans are very good at customer service and marketing,
and these were businesses that made quite an effort to attract at
retain new customers. Conversely,  I was watching a program on TN (
http://delicast.com/tv/Argentina/TN24Horas )  on business development
in Argentina, and the porteño panelists really hammered the point that
customer service in Argentina sucked...

A few of the rules that the ballroom schools came up with, and most
dances in the USA still follow, were:
1)Do not say "no" to an invitation
2)Do not ask someone you don't know (especially someone much better
than you) more than once a night
3)Only dance once dance in a row.
4)For professionals - find the wallflowers and get them dancing.

Whether these rules make people "nicer" or not, I don't know, but they
make the beginner's experience more pleasant.

IMHO, YMMV