Today is the second week of my company's warehouse sales event and yesterday was my day off from work.
My days off at the moment are spend visiting all my current ongoing renovation projects, so they aren't really days off from work, more like days to manage my other work, and my other work is almost completing soon, so hopefully I can really properly enjoy my off days soon.
Todays' event was surprisingly not as busy as last week even though the crowd was about the same, I am still at the rug section, but instead of being assigned Bangladeshi workers to help me roll open the carpets, I was assigned 2 part timers who are currently still in Poly. The difference between having them around as opposed to the Bangladeshi workers is huge because customers don't feel as comfortable asking help from 2 young boys to roll out the huge carpets for them as they would with the Bangladeshi workers, a lot of them just do it themselves, or when they request for the carpets to be unrolled, they will say...
... and then the 2 boys will roll only 1/5th of it out and that was it. That being said, I did get one customer who still insisted the boys to roll out the carpet in it's entirety and then right after the first carpet has been rolled out, ask for another large one to be rolled on top of the already rolled out one because he wants to compare the size, which is bloody redundant because the size of the carpet is literally written on the tag. The 2 carpets ended up being almost the same size and he went for the slightly bigger one, he was with his Interior Designer, and his Interior Designer recommended him to get the purple rug with gold lines, it looked really tacky so I am questioning the designer's taste and am even more curious of the vision he has for the client's place.
Anyways, speaking of customers, I met a Caucasian customer earlier in the day and she was with her husband and another middle aged man who could either be her friend or her designer. Initially when she first signaled me to help her reserve a bed she had been eyeing on, she was very nice, she was sharing how she really liked the bed and was going to purchase it immediately, being super friendly as most Caucasians usually are, I reserved the bed for her, she thanks me, and then heads off to look at other things.
A few minutes later, she appears at the lighting section, she sees me at the rugs section and signals me over, I am not in charge of the lighting section, but decided since she was probably comfortable with me, I will just go and help her reserve the lights as well. She then points out this pendant light that she had her eyes on and ask me how much it was, the lights were not priced, so I told her I will check with one of the in-charge to see if they can set a price for her.
The in-charge then informs me that if the lights are not priced, then it is not for sales yet, and that because everyone is currently very busy, they are not able to price everything. This was actually also briefed before the event started, that if something is not priced, we should tell the customer the item is not for sales yet, so I thought if that is going to be the protocol, then the customers should also just respect that protocol because everyone on the floor is genuinely very busy.
I relayed that information to the Caucasian customer and she actually got a bit upset and insisted I get the price for her....
"I really like this light and I want to get it, could you get the price for me please! Thank You"
.... and that "Please" and "Thank You" was said with a very condescending tone, I could sense her annoyance that I did not manage to get the price for her, so I told her I will ask around again and got another in-charge in, I told her that the client really wants to know the price, so she went to talk to the boss and then after that I just left the Caucasian customer for her to deal with.
She wasn't out rightly rude, but I could sense she was unhappy and she was like a spoiled brat who couldn't take No for an answer with her "I don't care how busy everyone is, I want this and I want you to make it happen because I want it!" attitude.
Anyways, after a while, I notice my newbie colleague ended up helping her out and they got along really well, he was very helpful, I could tell she really liked him and it just made me even more annoyed because I was really hoping she would be consistent with her unpleasantness, but she wasn't, she only turns into that form when things are not going her way, I mean she was super nice and friendly when I could help her with the bed, all it took was one unpriced item for her to switch, imagine if she were one of my renovation project customer, the forms she will evolve into when things eventually go wrong, probably become a huge cunt that's just constantly leaking with that thick viscous pus of self-entitlement.
Her pleasant disposition was giving me very Ellen DeGeneres vibes in the sense that her niceness felt superficial.
Aside from her, the other customers weren't generally too unpleasant to deal with, most of them are nice and I was just bored throughout the day because very few customers actually came up to me and my part timers to request for the carpets to be unrolled for them to see, it is very classist but it worked in my favor today and I hope I will get the 2 part timers again for tomorrow's final day.
To be very honest, the past few days, I have been feeling a bit out of place at work, not because of my colleague, but just the work scope in general. I applied to be an Interior Stylist and I was hoping that the position would be of a more creative role, to offer advice to customers about how best to plan their homes, to help them pick colors and accessorize their space, but all I have been doing so far is try and push sales and it's just becoming another numbers game. The work scope is more straightforward and less stressful than an Interior Designer for sure, but the focus on sales is just such a buzzkill for me.
I don't want to introduce the sofa to the client, and tell them the price of the sofa and then convince them to buy that sofa, I want them to come to me with questions about how to style their space, to let me be creative, but I have not been doing any of that, the only time I did that was when one of my colleague pulled me into her conversation with her customer to discuss colour schemes, that was the only time I felt like I was an Interior Stylist and not just another sales person in the showroom.
As an Interior Stylist, I feel like my job shouldn't be to push sales, that is what the Sales Associates should be doing because that is literally written in their job title. I feel like as an Interior Stylist, my job is to value add to the Sales Team Pitch.
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