Saturday, March 27, 2010

Favorite Retail Stories - 2 "Amanda, Tornados and Gift Wrapping"

Here's three more retail stories I thought you might like. 

Amanda knows her stuff

Here’s a story from my co-worker Amanda. I didn’t ask her if I could print this but I don’t think she’ll mind. 

She was talking with a customer when she noticed a gentleman kept looking at her. After a bit she asked him if he needed any help. He said, “No, I’ve just never heard a girl talk about theology before.”

Battle of the Bands and the tornado

A couple of years ago we had a "Battle of the Bands". The bands were playing in the parking lot and it was loud and people were having a great time. Then the clouds started to form and it began to rain. Everyone came inside the store and we let the bands set up and we resumed the contest inside. It was loud but the festivities continued. Then we got word that we were under a tornado warning. We announced that for safety reasons we had to stop the show and have everyone move to the employee break room. Our break room will comfortably hold about 40 people standing room only. Now here’s the problem—there were about 200 people there. Well, we stuffed as many as we could in the break room and the others mingled in the warehouse. No tornado ever showed up for the show but after about 20 minutes we were able to let everyone back in the store and the show picked up where it left off.  No worse for the wear but there was some creative stacking of the used books in the warehouse. 

Why I don’t wrap

We used to do gift wrapping as an added service. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t do gift wrapping well. One day I had a customer ask if I would wrap something for her. I said I would be happy to find someone to help her. She insisted that I would do fine so I wrapped her stuff and sent her on her way. A couple of days later she was in the store and she recognized me. She said “You were the guy that wrapped my books weren’t you?” “Yes, I was.” Then reality hit me. “That’s not your gift is it?” I’ve never wrapped another package since.

2 comments:

Kira said...

The wrapping story cracks me up! We do gift wrapping at our store and I think I am the only person that actually enjoys doing it!

Louis said...

We don't do gift wrapping any more but we do have gift bags. All we need to do on these is tie a bow. But I still try to avoid it!