I've been thinking about it, and I believe that someone had told me that West Germany was more formal in their speech. I was there prior to and during Reunification, so things possibly changed with the younger generation.
I had an interaction tonight where the last word the clerk said was, "bitte".
To be fair, I'm not sure how much I hear that, but boy can it mean a lot of different things, and doesn't seem particularly formal.
But I'm _really_ not one to judge on the formality of how people are speaking.
Oh, side note on this -- I went to this place because it had a DHL counter,
as I wanted to get my vote out in the hopes that it'll arrive by election day (in my case, it doesn't have to -- it just has to be post-marked by election day, and arrive by November 20th), and despite it being a US ballot, people still talked to me in German rather than switching to English.
Which was fine, of course -- especially in this case, where I understood the questions, the number quoted for the cost, and so on.
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