Category Archives: Blog

Shopper Profiles: Hasty McTweed

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If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m so creative when it comes to naming my regulars. So creative. Minivan Moron (drives a minivan and is a moron), Big Boss (always calls me “Big Boss”), Broseph McMoron (always calls me “bro” and is a moron). Yeah, super creative.

Anyway, meet Hasty McTweed.

Hasty McTweed

He rushes me, and he always wears a tweed sport coat. Really thought outside the box on this one.

Hasty has been around the shop for almost two years. I remember when he first came in. Short, grinning, curly-headed, he was pleasant enough at first, but he quickly cemented himself on the wrong side of the ledger.

There are many things that a Shopper can do to irk a retail associate, such as making us repeat ourselves, asking our advice and ignoring it, trying to pay for a small total of items with a $100 bill. You get the idea. These are relatively small things, but what makes them irritating is that they are common sense/courtesy lapses. If you’re at a small business, don’t use a $100 bill for a $5 purchase; it wrecks our cash reserves. If you don’t really care which product we think is the best for your money, don’t ask us. If you ask us a question, listen to our answer; it’s discourteous to make us repeat our answer to your question because you suddenly had an A.D.D. flareup.

Hasty’s sin was rushing me. He would place two or three items on the counter, and then immediately, before I even had a chance to pick up my scanner, he would ask for his total. Chill. Out. Seriously, just wait a few seconds for me to do my actual job before hassling me.

This was not an isolated incident, either. This happened every single time. It still happens to this day. The only difference is about six or eight months ago, he traded in his blazer for a hoodie. And it wasn’t as though he was even in that big of a rush really. I don’t know why he does it, but my goodness is it ever annoying. I’m not going to leave you hanging without telling you the total. I’m not going do anything mean to you. I might slow down a little bit, though (and I absolutely do).

This is right up there with the flight students who when buying a single item always question if I gave them their 10% discount. Simple math there, kiddo. If your total is less than the item’s price, yeah, I gave you your discount. Equally as annoying are the flight students who come in wearing a flight school polo and/or hat and tell me they’re a flight student. I know you are. You’re the only ones who wear that.

Yes, my list of grievances is long, but really, it’s not difficult to stay away from that list. We are all guilty of some infraction on that list from time to time. Hell, I have my own oopsies from time to time, but I’ll admit it when they happen and move on from there. My customers don’t, and that’s why they live forever in infamy in my mind and in comic form.

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Remember to explain things slowly to a Shopper. It gives you a higher percentage chance of any minuscule amount of comprehension.

By the way, that actually happened.

-The Retail Explorer

Do You. Understand the Words. That Are Coming Out of My Mouth?

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Ah, Chris Tucker, you were a king in the 90s.

Anyway, I thought after the last post that I should elaborate more on how language is no barrier at all in how we conduct business here. I will get the one exception out of the way immediately, though: I do have foreigners who do not speak English well, if at all, come into the shop from time to time. Often, they’ll come in with a friend or family member to help out, but it’s still difficult.

The language barrier has led to many problems throughout history; retail is no exception. Once we get beyond that, though, we’re all just people, and many of the foreigners I deal with who have issues with English are very pleasant and courteous.

Then there are the flight students…

The flight students are the bane of my existence, the source of the majority of my problems. Most of them (I’d say around 90%) are foreign students who train here and then return to fly in their home countries. Admittance to this flight school seems to be a little as answering “yes” to the question, “Can you pay the tuition?” I wish I were exaggerating. If they had to pass a test to get into the school or meet any other requirements, they might not be as completely useless in my store as they are.

The other week, I had a visit from one of my more despised regulars. If you’ve been following my twitter for any length of time, you’ve seen him mentioned. He is a chore. Every time he comes in, I can expect to have to repeat myself on every explanation at least twice, usually more. I have come to refer to him by the name “Big Boss” because he always calls me that. I don’t know why, but he does every time. If you’ve ever worked in the service industry, then you know how much we love pet names from our customers. (If you haven’t worked in the service industry, we don’t like pet names. Not at all.)

When he came in on this particular time, he could sense my frustration with him not listening to me. So, he said to me, “You have to be patient with me. English is not my first language.”

Okay…

Here is why this is just an excuse to cover for his own laziness. These flight students, despite coming from other countries, speak English decently to excellently. They can read it well. They can comprehend it well. So well, in fact, that they can receive instruction in English, read highly technical textbooks in English, and take FAA-administered type rating examinations in English. If you can do that, ESL is not a hindrance; it becomes a scapegoat.

He asks me questions constantly, and I provide as simple of an answer as I can. He just doesn’t listen. For example, one time, he brought up a package of sheet protectors that are made to fit a kneeboard. (A kneeboard is essentially a trapper-keeper for pilots. It’s a small binder strapped to the pilot’s leg that keeps important information available at a moment’s notice. Usually, they come in four- and seven-ring configurations.) The packaging makes it clear what the product is and how it is used.

“So, are these the sleeves for the kneeboard?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“And you can put pages in it?”

“Yes.”

“And how do I put it into the kneeboard?” asks the man who uses a kneeboard every day he’s in an airplane.

“If your kneeboard has them, you put rings in holes in the spines and then those rings go through the holes in the sleeves.” At this point, I can’t believe I’m having to explain to a grown man how binders work.

“Oh, I see, I see. And you can put any pages in there?”

“Anything that will fit in them, yeah.”

“Will it fit approach plates?”

Considering that they’re made for them, yeah. “Yes.”

“Okay, okay, I see, I see.”

This is how all of our conversations go. I spend way too much time explaining simple products that not only explain themselves on the packaging, but are also used by him and his fellow student pilots every single day.

This is not a language barrier; this is laziness. This is him looking around his world and seeing very little. He wanders in the dark waiting for someone to shine the flashlight around for him. I have a great deal of patience and understanding for someone who legitimately struggles with language, but if you use that as an excuse, as a crutch, for your indolence. This is a dangerous excuse for anyone, let alone a student pilot.

To add more fuel to this fire is the fact that his best friend at the flight school is another notorious regular at my shop: Minivan Moron, named so because he drives a minivan and is a moron. Minivan Moron once came to my shop three days in a row because he, apparently, couldn’t figure out how to work scissors to trim down a checklist that was just about a quarter inch too wide for the kneeboard sleeves he had. Three. Days. In. A. Row. That is the company Big Boss keeps. These are men in their late thirties or early forties. It blows me away constantly.

It all boils down to the perception that the majority of my customers, who are grown adults, come into my store expecting to be taken by the hand and led through this tiny store, which I personally set up with ease of navigation in mind, and they will use anything to excuse their laziness. Most of them can’t even find a chart in an alphabetized grouping. Hell, most of them don’t even know what area they’re flying in. I don’t care if you are a foreigner. When I travel, I know where the hell I am in the world. It’s just good to know.

They constantly amaze me. That is why I study them.

-The Retail Explorer

Dressing Up is Hard to Do

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Just because the comic is on hiatus this week doesn’t mean we still can’t hang out. I mean, we are friends, right? Right?

Moving on.

If there’s one question I get regularly that will lead to a difficult shopping experience, it’s “Do you have pilot uniforms?” There is no long answer to this question, and anyone who has spent more than thirty seconds inside my tiny shop will know that the answer is “yes.”

I really don’t feel that I’m being too harsh here. (We are, after all, talking about people who want to fly you around inside a hollow tube at 30,000 feet and 500 miles per hour, so I tend to set the bar a tiny bit higher than us normal folk.) Aside from that is the fact that there are literally only TWO aisles in the entire shop, and both of them have pilot uniform items on display (and both of them have pilot uniform shirts).

Still, as persistent as a pimple that will just never go away, regardless of what remedies you try, this question arises constantly. A two-minute walk around the shop would yield this answer quite easily, and in that time, one would find pilot shirts, sweaters, epaulets, wings, ties, identification badge holders, and much more. The other question I get, which too falls into the category of “Why didn’t you just look around for two damn minutes first?”, as well as the category of “Why the hell would I hide perfectly good merchandise in the back when I could actually sell it to you?”, is “Do you sell pants?” Again, a quick look around would yield no pants and answer that question. Go to Kohl’s instead.

So, it’s completely baffling to me as to why these questions keep hanging around. I have a number of theories. Laziness, for one. Well, that’s really the only one that keeps making sense. What follows, though, is the most compelling aspect of these interactions: explaining male dress shirt sizing. Oh, yes, what fun.

I get it; it’s different. It’s not like you pull the collar of the t-shirt you’re wearing and crane your neck to the snapping point to that you wear a medium and then go to the shelf that has shirts that say “medium” on them and take them up to the register to purchase them. That would be too easy and take away from the good things about dress shirts. Dress shirts are made to make you look your very best. They’re for more formal occasions, like business meetings and balls and regattas. (I’ve never been to a regatta, but I assume you have to look at least halfway decent.) A fitted shirt helps you put your best foot forward.

If you’ve never bought a dress shirt before, they go by neck size, usually by the half inch. The rest of the shirt will fit proportionally. That way, you can ensure that you will have a good look that fits your body properly. They come in normal cut and tapered, which is more form-fitting, and in short sleeve and long. We also can order them in tall varieties for you lanky fellows.

So, the first thing I do is ask them what size they wear. Usually, this is met with a blank stare and maybe an “umm…”. Obviously, if you’ve never purchased a shirt in this manner before, you won’t know what size you wear. If i had a proper measuring tape, I could expedite this process, but if I tried to list the items I needed around this shop, the list would go on until Christmas. Anyway, what I mean is their normal size (small, medium, large, etc.) so that I can at least narrow down our choices and home in on correct size for them.

The best indicator of a good fit is how the collar fits when it is buttoned. This requires repeated prompting from me. Ideally, you should be able to just slide your index finger between your neck and the buttoned collar; it should be snug or too loose against your finger. That’s the sweet spot. But it takes my customers a little extra time to get from point A to point B, and I still have no idea why.

That’s why I go back to laziness. All of the information sits before them; they just choose not to gather and analyze it for themselves. I mean, why do it yourself and be a self-sufficient person when you can have someone do it for you? It’s not like this is, oh, I don’t know, flying a jet airliner, or anything like that.

This is my world. This is what I deal with on a daily basis. I’m not above helping someone find something. I can’t tell you how lost I was my first few months tossed into the aviation deep end. I could barely tell you the difference between IFR and VFR products. And searching for specific books was impossible. But if you can’t be bothered to use the tools nature gave you and, instead, hide behind a veil of excuses, especially the language excuse, I die a little bit inside.

I’ll talk more about the language barrier, or lack thereof, in another post, but suffice it to say, it’s rarely anything of consequence. They just use it as a convenient scapegoat.

The bottom line is this: When you go shopping, it’s okay to ask questions; it’s okay to not be able to find something. That’s what they pay us to do: help. We just ask that you take a moment to try for yourself, and if after you’ve looked around and come up empty, we will be more than happy to help you find it. I still get a little chuckle out of hearing, “If it had been a snake, it would have bitten me.” I don’t know why, but I do. And when you do ask us a question, please, for the love of all that is holy in this world, listen to our answers, and process that information. Making us repeat explanations does nothing to endear yourself to us; quite the opposite, in fact. Just try to use that beautiful head on your shoulders.

-The Retail Explorer