Just to get things up-to-date: I have moved back to Romania and I had a lot of things to do. The last three months have been very busy for me, that’s why I was unable to update my blog regularly. Our project at work just got… well, more interesting and demanding and the little spare time I had, I have spent it with occasional trips here and there, so I have a lot of interesting things to write about, that is not an issue. 🙂 . About those trips: I’ll describe them in future posts… right now I have something interesting to share:
I went today for a drive in the city, and stopped at one of the local malls to do some shopping. I needed a pair of new jeans, so I went to look for one. I went in a lot of shops trying to search for the best items to buy. Everywhere the shop-keepers just said hi (in some places not even that) and let me look at the stuff myself. To tell the truth I wasn’t even in a chit-chatting mood, so I was trying to avoid them with a brief “No thanks, just looking”. The keepers pulled back politely, I guess trying to avoid “hurting the client’s feeling” 🙂 … and after a few minutes I walked out of the store without buying anything…
There was one shop (I will not write the name, my blog is not an advertising panel 😛 ), where I actually found the “jeans of my dream”, the keepers seemed a bit more cunning… after the usual “May I help you?” she informed me about a promotion they had:
buying above 250 RONs would bring a price reduction of 100 RONs. With the jeans I have selected, I was short with 60 RONS from that. basically I could get something for another 100 RONs, and I would have payed the same price as for the jeans alone. I got a little confused… there was nothing really I wanted to buy from there apart from the jeans… I went back to look around, and found a shirt which looked good, but it was white and I already had two which were similar. There was a dark blue shirt also, but that seemed too dark… I was looking at both of them silently for a brief moment of time, when suddenly the shop keeper popped up again next to me: “We have also a purple one”. Well to really understand this, it is better to note here, that I hate purple shirts… I don’t know why, but it seems too fancy for me. You can imagine the look on my face when the shop-keeper showed me the purple shirt… “Well, yes…. nice… but…” “Just try it on” she replied kindly… well, I went to the fitting room to try it on: it was ok, it was not too dark… and I certainly did not have anything like that among my shirts… and now… it hangs in front of me on the side of the wardrobe 😀 . It was actually obvious that what I was really searching for was a purple shirt: just between white and the dark blue, the golden middle path… I was just too stubborn to see it for myself…
I am not sure if the shop-keeper really understood my confusion and provided me purposely the right solution, but if she did, then she did an excellent job. This certainly is a rare thing to stumble upon. She managed to sell me one more thing and I still think I was not fooled, although I payed a little extra… Generally this way of providing help/solutions should be really easy: just pay attention to what people really need, see where the real problem lies and provide a useful solution. The problem is, people generally do not care of what others want, they just provide ONE solution, not THE solution, which would actually be needed. Paying attention to a customer should be a key thing in selling products. However shopkeepers are people too and unfortunately most of them cannot overcome the primordial instinct to keep their point of view in mind, although maybe a little more attention would be much more beneficial both for the sales and the customer… (maybe I would have bought my first purple shirt a long time ago, too 🙂 )