‘Let us browse in peace,’ a shopper pleads
In the words of my fictional columnist foremother, the uniquely annoying Carrie Bradshaw, “Shopping is my cardio.” And what better time to power shop than Canadian autumn, when the instant shift from scorching to frigid temperatures provides the perfect excuse to buy new clothes in an overheated shopping mall?
You might think, based on the gargantuan popularity of sites such as Amazon, that in-store shopping is no longer in style. But according to a recent study released by the American software company Time Trade, “most retail shoppers prefer the in-store experience (to online) so they can feel and touch items.” In other words, it may actually be preferable to try clothes on before you buy them — a suspicion that has kept me loyal to the shopping mall even in the age of Etsy.
But something has changed at the mall of late and my loyalty has begun to wane. It’s not the food court — which is still reliably OK (you can’t go wrong with Teriyaki Experience) nor is it the soft-rock pumping non-stop from the ceiling, which is still reliably awful. No. It’s the customer service. It seems as though every time I enter a store, I am followed by a salesperson whose mission is not to accuse me of shoplifting, but to do something worse: to get to know me.
“Hey hon,” “Love your boots,” “What are you up to this weekend?” “How’s the weather outside?” “Did you catch Nashville last night?” “Wow that looks absolutely fantastic on you — have you tried it in blue?”
These are just a few of the myriad salutations, comments and questions that might meet you when you step through the door of a mall clothing store — and sometimes before. It’s a sales technique I’ve dubbed, Helpfulness Stalking. To whit, the pathological desire to assist a customer who needs no assistance, who tells you she needs no assistance, and then tells you again, and becomes so fed up she takes her patronage elsewhere.
As a technique (or disorder, let’s call a spade a spade), Helpfulness Stalking has three distinct stages, similar to the Five Stages of Grief and Loss described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her classic, On Death and Dying, which these days you might rather read than go clothes shopping. Step 1 is the over-familiar greeting: “Hey hon, how are you making out?” Step 2: Inappropriate prying: “Are you two sisters? Oh, lesbians! That’s so cool. I love Ruby Rose on Orange Is the New Black.” Three? The over-the-shoulder-mirror commentary when you check yourself out in a dress that does not flatter you in any way but your salesperson insists has turned you are a dead ringer for Ariana Grande.
Now, there are undoubtedly bigger problems in the world than the overzealousness of salespeople — I’m acutely aware of the privilege aroma rising from this column. But the existence of grave problems in the world should not, if we want to stay sane, preclude us from pin- pointing small but highly irritating ones that affect us day to day. Which is to say: I know I sound like a spoiled jerk and salespeople are just trying to do their jobs, but someone has to make this request for the good of all mall-kind. Please, salespeople, give yourselves a break and let us browse in peace.
And it turns out that Helpfulness Stalking may not be a simply silly problem. “I think the truth,” says Doug Stephens, retail expert and author of The Retail Revival, “is that an inordinate number of retailers in Canada right now are probably one month away from going out of business . . . My gut tells me that if you’re being hounded by salespeople in stores, it’s because the management of those chains are insisting that salespeople sell things every hour that they’re on the sales floor.”
The problem, says Stephens, is that while retail salespeople are being pressured to sell at a faster rate, their employers usually don’t have the resources to teach them effective sales techniques. “In the absence of training,” he says, “they default to ‘Can I help you?’ and the knee-jerk reaction we all have to that is to run in the other direction.”
I’ve done just that. To escape the scourge of unsolicited mall small talk, I’ve started shopping (close your eyes) on hipster-heavy Queen St. W. in Toronto. And you know something? I’m beginning to miss it. Helpfulness Stalking. It seems that in escaping it I’ve entered an alternate universe where the average salesperson (perched behind a desk, flipping through a magazine) not only fails to greet you when you walk in the door, he declines to answer your repeated requests for assistance because he can’t hear you over the droning of a Tom Waits record.
And let’s face it: he probably wouldn’t look up from his Zine if Tom Waits himself walked into the store. Amazon here I come.