Look
at me! I’m posting on a fairly regular
basis! Onto the entry…
First
off, only my humblest respect is meant to Simon & Garfunkel for the title
of this entry. However, it is quite
fitting.
The
latest installment features another customer interaction that I learned about
during my stint in appliances the other day.
This was just too good to pass up.
Do you want to feel better about your life? Well, then read on!
A
customer had recently purchased a refrigerator from our store. This refrigerator was a floor display that
was sold to him at some dirt-cheap price – nearly a thousand dollars off of the
original price. The customer called the
department later that day saying he wanted to cancel the refrigerator because
he was reading reviews that it was a bit loud.
Okay,
I get that. If you live in a small home
and noise is an issue, you don’t want it sounding like a freight train coming
through, right? But there are a few
directions you can go with this scenario.
1. There is a high chance that it was plugged in
when he purchased it. It was a demo
unit. Did he hear noise in the store?
2. Why cancel it before you even got it
into the home? If you saved over a
thousand dollars for a great refrigerator, wouldn’t you want to try to at least
see if it sounds fine? Even if
it is loud, you can still either return the item with no restocking fee or you
could ask yourself, “Is this noise not worth the hundreds of dollars I saved?”
Whoever
took the call was able to talk the guy out of it (mainly because they told the guy
that they’d be able to sell a great fridge at dirt-cheap to a less picky
customer on that same day.) but that wasn’t the end of it.
The
guy called the next day and told the supervisor that he wanted to come into the
store and listen to the refrigerator for two hours to see how it runs. He wanted us to get the refrigerator that
somebody had already wrapped up and placed off the floor, bring it back onto
the floor, unwrap it, and then plug it in just so he could sit around and
listen to it.
I
don’t know about you, but I sure as hell wish I could have two hours to kill
just sitting around some electronics store doing nothing else other than
listening to how a refrigerator sounds.
Even when I’m home, I have things to keep me busy. I have to give it up to the guy. He did find the one thing that sounds more
boring than actually selling appliances:
listening to them run.
According
to the appliance team, the guy came in just the other day, listened to it for
less than a half hour, talked with the appliance crew about all the customer
reviews he read online (UGH! That’s a
whole other blog post alone. Wait have
I already done one of those? Shit. See, this is what happens when you don’t
update regularly.), and ended up canceling it anyway. I went up to the refrigerator that he was sold, stood around the
item with another coworker for several minutes, and didn’t hear a damn
thing. I just heard the sounds of his
parents weeping at the wasted time their son wasted in our store.
More soon from the frontline...
I’ve
mentioned before how lazy I think humans have become. For instance, I don’t even intend to edit this blog. Then again, why start now, right?
(ba-doom-cha)
I
think, however, that the next story takes the cake.
I
was working in our store’s appliance section for the day and had a customer
approach me with a look that was equal parts apprehension and hope. He proceeds to tell me that he purchased a
gas stove about a month ago and had a few questions about how to use it. I thought, “Oh, great, a product I’m not too
familiar with and this guy is going to ask some oddball questions that not even
the manufacturer has thought up.”
Once
we walked up to the gas stove that he said looked identical to the one he
purchased – besides the fact he bought one with five burners instead of the
four that were on this one and the fact that the electronic displays were
completely different, but other than that they were identical – and I braced
myself. So, it was to my surprise when
he told me he wanted to know how to start the oven. At first, I thought he was kind of fucking with me. How do you start the oven? Really?
Even I knew that one!
“Uh,
well, let’s say you want to bake something.
You just hit the bake button and hit this button to increase the temperature.”
Holy
shit, that was easy!
“That’s
it?”
Yeah,
genius! That’s it. Welcome to ‘Things I Learned When I Was
Ten’.
“Yep,”
I replied.
“Do
I need to hit this ‘Bake Time’ button?”
Okay,
a bit harder. That’s when I stumbled
upon an obvious solution. The owner’s
manual! I knew that most of the
appliances the store had on display had their manuals somewhere. I first opened the oven door but came up
empty. I then opened the broiler drawer
and – A-HA! – found what I was looking for.
“I’m
not sure but the manual should say what to do.”
I
made sure that that sounded as obvious as it should’ve been to anyone who has
purchased anything in the past and had to consult an owner’s manual for an
answer. He could’ve saved himself a
trip to the store if he just broke open the manual. What was this guy thinking?
“Ah,
yeah, I know we could’ve looked through it but it’s so long and confusing. You can never figure those things out.”
Sure,
if you were looking up how to bring a space shuttle back down to Earth but
we’re talking about a stove. The manual
was less than 25 pages long and it’s not like it was in four-point font. If you cut out the small print at the end
that nobody pays attention to, the pertinent information only account for about
20 pages. And if you cut out all the
pictures, then you’re down to about half that of actual instructions. I found the answer in less than thirty
seconds. But that was too confusing?
See
what I mean?
You
have to spoon-feed people. Nobody seems
to want to do anything for themselves any more. I think I’m going to rent myself out for reading services.
“WILL READ FOR MONEY. WILL READ
INSTRUCTION MANUALS, CHILDREN’S BOOKS, NOVELS, NEWSPAPERS, BLOGS, I-TUNES FINE
PRINT, STREET SIGNS, ETC., ETC…”
In
a world of lazy fucks, I’d be rich!
Rich I tells ya!
Feel
free to use this idea for your own monetary pursuits. However, if I see any advertisement like that in my area, I’m
asking for 10% commission.
More soon from the frontlines...