Class acts
Two stories about how to tarnish your image:
#1.
This afternoon I took my three kids down to South Coast Plaza for an event marking the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. The newspaper promised “a Lunar Rover and Apollo 10 space suit along with a Sojourner Mars Rover will be on exhibit.” Well… maybe. Neither the suit nor the Mars Rover looked like they had ever seen action, and they were conspicuously unguarded on a raised platform behind velvet ropes. (As we approached, one man had already stepped over the stanchion to have his picture taken with the items. I doubt Smithsonian-level relics would be left so untended.) And the Lunar Rover looked like a replica — big plastic tires with no wear on them, and the body of the vehicle emblazoned ever in an odious manner with the logo of Omega, the sponsor. Quelle dommage. This was our only scheduling opportunity to note a signal anniversary, a giant step that makind made and should have kept making further and further out, and this is how we spent it: at a mall, looking at ads for a watch slapped all over a fake lunar vehicle. It was a sad reminder of how far we’ve gone in 40 years — in reverse. I now think less of Omega, less of South Coast Plaza for false advertisement, and certainly less for the nation as a whole for letting our space program sink into the tarn.
#2.
While there, I decided to visit the Montblanc store. I was out of ink cartridges for my fountain pens, and when my younger son and I visited the Montblanc store in Glendale on Friday we discovered that it had closed, in what I thought was another sign of the economic recession. The four of us located the Montblanc store in South Coast Plaza. I told the sales clerk, a man probably in his late 20’s, that I needed some ink cartridges for my fountain pens, and bought a box (ten packs of six). I took the opportunity to bring up the closure of the Montblanc store at the Glendale Glendale Galleria.
Clerk: “That store was actually doing well. The company closed it because they didn’t want to serve a lower class of customer.”
Me: “I bought three fountain pens there, an injector, two ink wells, and lots of cartridges. I’m sorry people like me weren’t classy enough.”
Now, mind you, that’s about $1500 in pens and supplies. The clerk did his best at backpedaling, blaming the closure now on the mysterious ways of corporate owners in Germany unmotivated by strong sales to obviously valued clients like me. But by then I was looking to go some place where the lower class are more welcome.
July 12th, 2009 at 3:20 am
There’s a valuable lesson in story #2 for that clerk, but he’ll be a few years more in retail (or life for that matter) before he’s got it fully patched in. I’m off on an excursion soon toward employment ( yes, a job ) and that clerk, whom I’ll never meet has taught me something about listening and then thinking before talking. As for story #1, just try finding a use for ‘tarn’ in a sentence everyday, there’s no mean feat there.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Did you really think the Mars Rover you’d be seeing had gone to Mars and back? I’m not sure what you were expecting.
July 12th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Hah! Touche, Geoff. This is partly what comes of drinking whiskey while posting.
So no, I didn’t expect to see a Mars Rover that had been there and back. Actual built-for-intended-use models would have suited us fine. The Mars Rover on display seemed to be one of those; the Omega-logo-plastered Lunar Rover was a joke made out of plastiform circa 2009. My utmost upset, which I was trying to get at, is what’s happened to the space program. If we’d wanted to make a “stimulus” investment that made a real difference in the economy and in the future of the nation, it should have been in the space program.
July 12th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
In response to item #2 a worker in any store should never imply that patrons of a certain area are not the type of customers that the store wants. After all if you are spending money in a store that store should want you. What store can turn down a paying customer?
Stores can show what kind of customer they want with just the decore, music played, items they sell, and the price they charge. Even then a store should not turn away a customer if that customer does not fit the person they want. That person may be in a store for a item as a gift for a person the store may want to sell to.
The bottom line is the color of money is the same no matter where it comes from.