We Have Failed

Caleb Kunz
09.26.11
HUEN 121
Illustration Essay Rough Draft
We Have Failed
“Can I help you?” is a common phrase we unfortunately hear less each year. We may hear it from our fellow shopper or from the persistent salesperson; nevertheless, this politeness is falling from our vocabulary. We can see in today’s shopping world that many times customers receive inadequate customer service as a result of poor salesmanship. Poor salesmanship and salespeople not caring that they are falling short of the expectations of customers and employers are the main results of being caught up in this modern world of technology and instant gratification.
In a world of instantaneous indulgence, salespeople lose focus on what is important to the customer. I have learned from my experience as a part-time manager in hardware sales that many of the younger salespeople dislike helping customers who need personal help or advice about certain products. One of my coworkers, “Max”, is a perfect example of this attitude. Raised with a shopping experience of shopping online, or at stores that focused on self-service; an attitude of: only idiots need good customer service, formed in Max. Almost every shift he would complain about customers that “still shop the old-fashioned way.” Focusing on the fact that people do not utilize the easy access of the internet and ship-to-home services which online stores like eBay, Amazon, Walmart.com offer, his favorite complaint was that these “idiots” did not shop on the internet. From my experience with Max I have found that many salespeople, including myself, shop at non-specialized stores that focus on making it easy for us to shop on our own. When we are shopping on our own and tending to ourselves, many times we as salespeople forget what it means to stay focused on what the customer needs.
Another one of the core reasons for poor salesmanship is failures in training. One of the managers, “Gertrude”, which trained me was notorious for poorly training new employees. One time after I had worked there for a while, I heard Gertrude telling a new salesperson about a product, and all I can remember is thinking, “Yeah! Back in the 80’s!” This was not the first time or last that I had this form of reaction to her training, and I was not the only one. It came to the point where none of the sales reps paid attention to her training. These kinds of failures in training cause the poor salesmanship that is beginning to dominate retail today. A result of this is the growth of encounters with inefficient salespeople, which causes great discouragement to all that care about sales. This often results in complacency and little motivation for salespeople in their lives in the workplace.
Complacency and a lack of motivation are the two main factors contributing to poor salesmanship today. Max’s constant mood of complacency regularly affected his work ethic. Not a day went by that I did not receive a complaint about his work. There was one time that Max made a duplicate of a key, and (like with many of his duplicate keys) the customer brought it back because it did not work. This customer had tried several times to get his original key duplicated, and was each time told that each new duplicate would work, and it did not. Later that day I brought this situation up with both my managers and Max, and once again we received the typical Max response, “Oh, OK.” Max was the living breathing epitome of complacency and detachment in a salesperson. But this was not all his fault. There was little incentive for him to do a good job. Small-town, mom-and-pop stores find it difficult to acquire quality employees for small-town wages. Max was willing to work for these wages because he knew that few others would, and this guaranteed him a job. In other stores too there are insufficient incentives, which often cause the opposite effects of incentives on employees. If an employee does not care about his or her performance, then he or she is unfit for retail.
In a high-speed electronics world of instant communication and satisfaction, salespeople find it hard to focus on a slower paced shopper. Politeness is fading to the background and we fail to see this happening. Even outside of the shopping arena we fail to heed Peter’s admonition in I Peter 3.8, “…be courteous:”, only proving our sin nature.

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