SHOPPING AROUND - Customer Interactions

In daily retail life, you encounter odd views of what sort of shop the customer actually thinks you are. Some of it surfaces through unsolicited advice, pointing out some perceived presentation error or tragic omission on your part, in your stock or merchandising.

One lady the other week came into the shop and purposefully stood by the counter in order to inform me of the following:-

'I love your glass cards, but you know what you really need to do to make them a must purchase for me? A little dragonfly in one corner. Just a little dragonfly. Do that, and instantly get a sale, from me?'

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We both tend to be making stock items when we are in the shop. Most of the time I am glueing fabric onto something, be it a box, a frame, a piece of card. Children will stop and stare. But on this occasion it was a small woman,late middle aged, portly. After a while of standing by watching, she said.

'What do you use to glue the fabric?'

'I use PVA'

'I use pintail book binders glue on all the fabric covered items that I make'

As I didn't really respond much. I thought for a moment she might be about to try selling me something she'd made. Opening her shopping bag and pull something fabric covered and horrendous from it. Instead she launched into full promotional mode. 

'You should use them they're so much better for that kind of job I find. Pintail bookbinders glue, its the best. Pintail bookbinders glue. Look it up, its really good.

It was almost a song, a sales jingle. Maybe I should have risen above my indifference and manufactured a level of interest and my fakery might have curtailed all this. But once I've taken against being receptive to unsolicited advice there is no going back. I ended up with my 'gruntle" being very 'dissed', and she no doubt left feeling unheard, which she was. 

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Some customers arrive on a mission. They have this imagined product in their mind that they are in desperate search of. Everywhere they find things that are never quite it, they're either the wrong colour, pattern, shape or proportion. Shopping? It's tough.

So it was the other day. Hubby makes a small key ring coin purse out of cork fabric, which sell quite well. Great for keeping small amounts of change and the odd doggy poo bag in. But this customer had something else, another entire unspoken usage in mind, so she asked:-

'Do you make a purse exactly like this, but a fraction bigger.'

The answer to this was plain, and I would have thought quite glaringly obvious. If the purse was a fraction bigger it would not be exactly like this. If we did make one a fraction bigger, then it would be out on the display. How much exactly would a fraction bigger be anyway? What did she want it to be a faction bigger for? Rather than go into all the specifics of my queries and linguistic knit picking, I just said; 

'No, I'm sorry we don't' 

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You never can account for peoples unvoiced prejudices. How do people who come into the courtyard respond when they see a man knitting or using a sewing machine in our shop? Just occasionally you catch a hostile look from outside, perhaps a burly midlander with a long suffering bedraggled wife, a pram, several stroppy kids and a mangey dog. You get the picture?

But then some folk can take you completely unawares. Hubby was in the shop recently and a couple seemed to be looking keenly over our shelves of wax melts outside. Then in a highly offended tone, sternly declared:-

'Ugh they're bloody vegan' 

And walked off.

It was as though they'd been forced to handle excrement, or were for once making a principled stance of only buying wax melts made from natural organic animal tallow. There is literally no pleasing some folk.

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Sometimes people are just insensitive, they don't realise until they've said it. A couple of quite well heeled women spent time quietly wandering around the shop. As they left one said to the other:- 

Maybe you, you could find something in Covent Garden? 

Then over her shoulder as though offering me a morsel of praise, said:-

'Nice shop you have here.'

Yet whatever it is we are, we are not up to Covent Garden standard, apparently.

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Most of the time our customers are quite sweet and you can enjoy a bit of light badinage with them. Sometimes the wit comes from them. We sell a range of natural soaps, and they are one of our most popular lines. We offer a deal of three for £12 which is a small saving of £1.50 on the full RRP.  Some people, despite the signs, don't quite pick up on the deal, so we may remind them of it at the counter. A local lady, originally from Germany, came to the counter with two soaps.

'Just these, danker'

You get these for twelve pounds if you buy three. Responding with.....

'Oh, no dear,  I won't be living that long.'