My all time favourite customers of all time (seriously, all time) are the ones who don’t know what they’re looking for. The ones who, when asked “Is there anything I can help you find?” respond “Uh, glasses?” with a smirk that is normally reserved for teenage girls who have just made a hilarious quip about the kid with patchy hair and nose-warts who has to run along-side the bus, since he’s not allowed on the bus because he smells and touches things (like the bus driver’s hair) but he can’t walk to school alone in the morning or else he’ll get distracted by a homeless man who he thought looked like a kitty cat. Not that that’s happened to me.
What was I saying?
Right. The customers who don’t know what they want.
I’ll usually respond with some sort of hilarious comment that they fail to appreciate (“Whoops! All sold out!” Ahahahaaaa! Juuuust kidding!”) and then offer to let them take a look around (by the way, if someone offers to let you “look around”, you should be immensely offended. It means that person would rather hang out with their co-workers who, trust me, are no prizes, than to hang out with you.) and I turn and walk away.
A lot of the time, though, they’ll simply start by demanding I find something that looks good on them, such as:
Me: Hi there, how are you do—
Customer: CAN YOU FIND SOMETHING THAT LOOKS GOOD ON ME?
Me: I—uhhh, suuuure. What did you hav—
Customer: I’VE NEVER WORN GLASSES BEFORE. I LIKE PURPLE.
Me: That’s good…(randomly grabs a purple frame) How abou—
Customer: THAT’S NOT PURPLE, THAT’S RED. I LIKE PURPLE I WANT PURPLE PURPLE.
Hm. The word “purple” doesn’t look like a real word any more.
Then there are the ones who absolutely have no idea what they want, but they sure as HECK know what they don’t want! I seriously had a lady a few weeks ago who responded to more than ten frames in a row that they were “hideous”, “terrible”, “just awful”, and even a raised-eyebrow-are-you-effing-kidding-me “Uhh, no,” before my hand even reached the frame. At this point, I gave her my usual “Well, why don’t I just let you look around (see!?! There it is!) to which she responded “Some help you are.”
I think you can all imagine how I reacted to that. I kept walking and cussed her out to my co-workers after she left. Yeah, take THAT you old wench!
Ultimately, though, our all-time favourites are the ones who come in and spend HOURS trying on every single frame in the store, keep dozens hoarded away so they can try them on and eliminate them at some future point in time (because none of the other customers in the store might want to try those ones on. I was once helping a customer who actually knew kind of what she was looking for, and I found a specific frame in some lady’s pile, announced that I would put it right back, and picked it up. You should have SEEN her reaction! “That was MY frame. I might WANT that.” I actually can’t even come up with a hilarious simile it was so vehemently hateful.) Anyway, these hoarders tend to spend upwards of two or three hours in the store needing at least one—if not two or three—employee’s full attention, only to announce that they don’t feel like shopping for glasses. They then leave, and we never see them again.
Another random side story (wow, these people must REALLY be my favourites of all time!) is from a few years ago when I had a customer who came and left four or five times over the span of an entire 8 hour shift, deciding on exactly which frames she wanted. In fact, I think I was even there until half an hour after close just so that I could take her freaking money. She wanted to look like Star Jones (WHY???) and kept showing me magazine photos of Star and her ill-fitting glasses, and at one point I actually had to tell her to stop showing me the photos because Star Jones has no idea how glasses are actually supposed to fit, and it was like she tried to cram size 12 feet into a size 7 shoe. A week and a half later, when this particular customer came in to pick them up, she decided that she wanted to exchange them. Before she even tried them on. She felt that I had—get this!—RUSHED HER.
Goodness me.
I LOVE YOU PHIL!!!!!!!!!
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