Retail Anecdote
A favorite bookshop — where all encounters are pleasant.
At some point yesterday, before I’d gone out, Kathleen complained that her cell phone battery wasn’t charging. I must have been in very good form, because I knew right away why. I remembered that she was using an ailing battery of mine that I’d replaced some time ago. I’d replaced mine, all right, but I’d forgotten to buy a second battery to replace hers, which was downright unusable.
Big deal, you say: why didn’t you just go back and buy the second battery? If you’re really asking this, you don’t own a cell phone. When I replaced my battery, I was careful to show up at exactly ten o’clock, when the AT & T Mobility (formerly Cingular) shop opened for business. All I can say about showing up later than ten o’clock is that it’s a pity that Dante didn’t live to exercise his taste for the lurid on waspish descriptions of cell phone stores. They’re all the same, their staffs grossly underpaid in order to maximize the compensation of officers and directors (so often the same people), and one fine day we shall round up the phone company executives en masse — they’ll be huddled together at the Masters in Augusta — and wheel them off to the guillotine. In the meantime, we must rely on our little grey cells — the ones in our head.
Here it was, the middle of the afternoon, and Kathleen was suggesting that I just “run in” and pick up a battery. In this weather, she opined, there would be no one there. Ha! I thought. I’ll go, I promised, at ten tomorrow morning.
But then another snafu altogether intervened. New York’s only surviving drug store — hey, free markets are great! — runs an automated telephone prescription refill system that, for the first time, pooped out on us. I okayed the the refills last week, but when I showed up at the counter I was told that no one had requested them. This might have been a nightmare, but it wasn’t; my clear and concise response to the pharmacist’s questions, edged perhaps with a touch of irritation but no more, convinced her that I was not a flake and that “the computer” had probably screwed things up. I was told that the pills would be ready in an hour. All of a sudden, I had time to kill.
Why not spend it at AT & T Mobility? Favorably buzzed by my red-tape-slashing experience with the Duane Reade pharmacist, I crossed the street and walked up the block. Contrary to Kathleen’s prediction, the AT & T Mobility store was not empty. But it wasn’t packed, either. A young woman with a clipboard, wishing to be far more pleasant than her stress levels permitted, asked how she could help me. It was not a genuine question. She was going to inscribe my name on her clipboard and ask me to take a seat. But I was ready for that. All I want to do, I said, is buy a couple of batteries for my Razr phone. My slightly too-bright smile implied a reminder that there was nothing to negotiate. I wasn’t going to mull over the pricing of plans, seek instructions about setting up my voice-messaging service, or claim that my phone had been stolen by brigands in Provence. I was going to pay for two batteries. Will there be a wait? I asked. I really shouldn’t have to wait, I said, because all I want to do is buy two batteries. If there’s going to be a wait, I’ll come back tomorrow at ten, I said. I was cheerful but very articulate. The very large gent in a dark suit whose aim was central-casting impassivity couldn’t help eyeing me with a warning frown, beneath which I detected a certain anxiety. He was dealing with a customer who was Prepared.
Impressed by the simplicity of my proposed transaction, and mad to get rid of me, the girl with the clipboard went overboard, and suggested that I might find the batteries that I wanted on the racks that lined the store’s walls. But I was ready for that, too. I knew that Razr phone batteries are not stocked on open racks, available to the public. They must be retrieved from the cabinets behind the racks — cabinets that a big guy like me would get in no end of trouble for trying to help himself to. Having expressed my doubt that the batteries were so readily available, I smiled brightly once again. This smile is a trick that I learned from matrons from both Westchester and Harris Counties, and it is even more effective when the smiler stands, even in his dotage, nearly two hundred centimeters tall, carries an Edwardian portliness, and dresses as well as the ladies who taught him. I was directed forthwith to a clerk behind the counter. My tactics were working. I had convinced the staff that there was an easy way to be done with me. Just sell me the batteries…
I wish you could have seen the clerk as he hunted and gathered for product. He found one battery soon enough, but he had to check two or three more cabinets before he located a second. I was ready for him to tell me that stock was running low at the moment and that I’d have to come back for a second battery. But no; after zigging and zagging across the floor, he returned to the desk with two batteries. You said “two,” right? he thought to ask. My reply involved sound, but no moving parts.
It was at this point that I realized that I had walked into the diorama of an early Twenty-First Century cell phone store. Nobody — aside from me, the girl with the clipboard, and the clerk who unearthed the batteries — had moved more than, say, the background figures in a cheap animated film. As I ran my credit card through the doodad with the screen that, in theory, requires your authorized signature, I noticed that the other clumps of people at the counter were still exactly as they had been before the clerk went hunting, while less engaged customers perused the goods that were available on the open racks with a bemused paralysis more typically brought on by the parade of wallpaper samples. The big guy in the suit, needless to say, merely breathed.
Back at Duane Reade, the new clerk, flustered, couldn’t find the refills. The dithering would have gone on indefinitely if the pharmacist hadn’t looked up from her break and intoned, “they’re ready,” in a voice that all but cast a spotlight on the elusive prescriptions. All it takes in this world, it seems, is sounding like someone who knows whereof he or she speaks.