The district’s mayors’ are constantly on our wireless’s imploring us to buy locally, not to shop out of town and keep the money revolving in the Wairarapa. It’s a good message. I just hope that it’s a public service broadcast and not a charge on ratepayers. Ironically our radio stations are mostly run by computers domiciled I imagine in Auckland where I suspect most of the advertising revenue accumulates.
There is no doubt local businesses, particularly retailers, are having a tough time, but I can’t help but wonder if to some extent they aren’t the architects of their own misfortune.
Some years ago I attended a two-day seminar on salesmanship in Palmerston North. The course lecturer was an Auckland real estate salesman named Kevin McMahon. He was a big man and an entertaining raconteur. One story I vividly recall was when he told us of holidaying in Queensland and visiting a menswear shop in Brisbane when he needed to buy a belt. He paused at this stage and asked the course attendees: “What does a shop assistant invariably say to you when you walk into a shop in New Zealand?” There were about twenty of us in the room and we all said in unison “Can I help you.”
McMahon then wanted to know, “And what is our response?” Again in unison, almost as though we had rehearsed it: “No thanks, I’m just looking.”
This, he reckoned, was the New Zealand shopping mantra.
But things, he said, were different in Brisbane. A young male shop assistant approached and asked him if this was the first time he had visited the shop? He affirmed that indeed it was. The shop assistant then told him they had a gift for first time customers and leaned under the counter and presented him with a small exquisitely wrapped parcel. There was a visitor’s book on the counter and the shop assistant asked if he could record McMahon’s name and address. With the gift in his hand he felt obliged to reciprocate in some way so he was happy to give the information. He was even asked for his date of birth which again he gave readily.
Now the young man wanted to know what he had come into the shop to buy. Kevin said he needed a belt. The young man led him to the section of the shop where the belts were located, but on the way paused at a rack of shirts. These shirts, McMahon was told, had been specially tailored for the firm to fit the fuller figure. The company had noticed that for some unknown reason when shirt manufacturers made shirts for the larger man they made the sleeves lengthier, wrongly assuming that a large girth indicated long arms. McMahon knew this only too well; he said he always had to wear elasticised arm bands to maintain his shirt sleeves at wrist level.
He tried on one of the shirts and was so impressed he bought three. The shop assistant - McMahon was now calling him a salesman - suggested a couple of nice silk ties to go with them. McMahon eventually walked out of the shop spending over two thousand dollars. Apart from the belt, the three shirts and the two ties he also bought two beautifully tailored Italian suits which fitted him perfectly.
When he got back to his hotel he opened the gift and found two silk handkerchiefs and a card with the salesman’s name on it. This meant, said McMahon, that each salesman in the shop had his own separate set of gifts.
Every birthday he gets a card from the menswear shop and three times a year they send him a brochure about their upcoming sale. Those items they think he might consider are highlighted and he is invited to visit the shop on the Sunday before that sale starts to have first choice of the items available.
McMahon said that this may sound ridiculous, but he now feels such loyalty towards this company, whenever he wants any clothes he hops on a plane and flies to Brisbane.
A lesson for retailers in this country? I think so. I’m so old I can remember when shop assistants always used to attempt to sell you something instead of expecting you to serve yourself. Sometimes this was a nuisance, but it inevitably resulted in a sale. The rot set in when the supermarkets enticingly laid out their product and introduced checkouts and service stations became petrol retailers.
Everyone else followed suit at their peril.
Last week I was holidaying up north and went into a number of gift shops where without exception there was always a woman sitting on a tall stool behind a counter and not one of them made any attempt to leave their comfortable repositories and assist me to find the article I was specifically seeking. Two of them were actually talking on the phone.
I walked out of all of them with money still jingling in my pocket.
These would be the self-same people who would respond to those reporting on the economic pulse of this country by telling them that business was “very quiet.”
