Shopping in Hospitality: Situational Constructions of Customer-Vendor Relationships among Shopping Tourists at a Bazaar on the German-Polish Border

This article presents an analysis of a short customer-vendor dialogue between a German couple and a Polish vendor at a food bazaar on the Polish border with Germany. In this situation, interactants have to negotiate and construct framings of hospitality abroad, customer-vendor relations, as well as intercultural relations. It is assumed that individuals hold their own subjective concepts of these three variables. Using tools from ethnomethodology's membership categorization analysis, this paper will delineate aspects of this constructionist process in which participants make use of concurrent and alternative framings to steer the interaction to a positive end for themselves. (Contains 1 figure.)