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The Extraordinary Buying Public2013-02-27 12:20:00 (читать в оригинале) On January 15th, in a postingon whether crafters are better suited to wholesale or retail sales, Melissa ofPrariefunk posed a question on this blog taken from www.craftsreport.com, written by Loretta Radeschi: “Do you enjoy meeting the buyingpublic?” I talk a lot with customers and that’s something I would miss ifWink and Flip were primarily wholesale. My daughter often sells at weekendmarkets and I accompany her. I ask our customers what they do for a living,where they live, what the ones who are students are studying. Girls who come inpairs are the most fun, since they are often on an outing, a shopping safari.When they safari, you become part of the hunt. “Who was your favorite customer today?” my daughter and I ask eachother at the end of a market day. This is a regular practice that came about asa way to vent the frustration that anyone who works with the general publicsometimes feels. A “favorite” customer is usually a euphemism for one that madeyou want to tear your hair out. Normally, it might be someone who picked upnearly every piece of jewelry on the table, didn’t buy anything, and didn’tentertain us. (Oh yes, our customers are tremendously entertaining.) I actuallythink customers don’t realize that every piece they touch has to be “fixed” byone of us so the table always looks perfect. I don’t mind re-merchandising the table; I do it withoutthinking. I just mind when someone absentmindedly and compulsively touches tento 15 pieces, and then walks away. I’ve never found our experience as bad as David Gallant, thecustomer service rep for Canada’s tax agency that created a lightly filteredinteractive point-and-click game about annoying customers called “I Get ThisCall Every Day.” As he says in his description of the game, “you can losepolitely, or lose spectacularly” but you just can’t win. Anyone who sells has had thosedays dealing with the general public. In nine years only two customers really stand apart from thecrowd. One was a woman at the Hester Street Fair who lived nearby and visitedpretty regularly. She was known to spend nearly $100 each time she visited, and Iwish I could tell you that was all she was known for. One week she came to the table with a delicate 30” chain necklacestudded with crystals that she had purchased from us a month or two earlier. Itwas in a ball. “How did this happen?” I asked. She said it was due to normalwear, but of course that wasn’t true. It looked as though it had been swimmingat the bottom of her purse for the past few weeks. I untangled the necklace andgave it back to her with a smile. Two weeks later she was back again, samething. But when she came a month later, with the poor necklace so knotted up, no one could work on it, we told her it would take some time to fix and she shouldcome back to pick it up next Saturday. She couldn’t return the following week, so she tookthe piece with her and I never saw her again. I asked my friend Jesse of Brooklyn Taco what he thought was goingon, and his idea was she needed attention. “Do you think she comes homeand her husband rips off her clothes before making passionate love, thenecklace goes flying into the corner, where her cat plays with it until itresembles a bird’s nest, and then she brings back to us?” He thought that wasvery funny. The other outstanding customer was a woman in her early 30s, dressed in business clothes, with a manicure. She walked up to our booth at UnionSquare and told us she had a necklace she purchased from us that summer andwould like it restrung. She took a small plastic bag out of herpurse and immediately we recognized the pieces of the necklace as one that my daughter sold. I walked out from behind the counter. “Let’s step over here,” Itold her and moved out of our booth. I wanted to keep her away from the othercustomers because I really wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out. “Can Itake a look at the necklace?” I asked. I turned the bag over in my hand, and shot a look at my daughter.It was pieces and beads and string. Our policy is that sales are final and wedon’t give refunds, but I told her: “We’ll be happy to replace this piece with one in blackbecause we no longer sell this color. It was a summer color.” I tried not to give awaywhat I was thinking. I was thinking that I wanted to give this woman whatevershe wanted so she would leave as soon as possible. “I really loved this one. Can’t you fix it?” she asked very nicely.This was the real tip off. The necklace looked as though it had been tossed into thebottom of a sailboat, a sailboat that took on water, more than 30 days earlier.Once a light brown, it was now moldy. “You really can’t wear this anymore,” I said softly. “I can giveyou a refund, or you can have the same necklace in black, which would youprefer?” She left with the black necklace, but she wasn't happy. She really wanted her necklace fixed. My daughter and Italked about what happened for a good half hour after she left. She looked soaverage. You could see she really loved the necklace and wanted to wear itagain. What she could not see is that she was asking us to repair something that was, literally,refuse. What’s really amazing is that in nine years, there are only two ofthese stories to tell. Despite both of these experiences, I really do enjoymeeting the buying public, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Wink and Flip wink and flip
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