Camera Store - The Hell of Retail

Whaddaya MEAN, you don’t have Ni-Cad AAs?

I have just finished reading a novel which is part of one of the longest, most diverse, and most interesting series of novels written in relatively recent times. (This might lead you to suppose that I am probably, although not necessarily, into Sci Fi or Fantasy).

(In the exciting world where I imagine this blog to exist, you, the reader, do not know me, but know (or are) my employer (or their lawyers), so I must keep my identity hidden while still revealing facts about my life, as above. However, I am well aware of the facts that I do not live in this romanticized world, that you probably know me (and the book I’m talking about), and that my employer could not care less about this blog. It’s still fun to play undercover clerk, though, even if only in my mind).

In any case…

So I want to go to a bookstore and get the next novel in the series. However, I am currently on a trip to my home country, where I strongly doubt any bookstore would have any but the most famous of this Russian author’s works (which are usually thought of as stand-alone books, but most of which are actually a part of this super-long storyline). This made me think of how frustrating it would be to go to a bookstore and not find the book. This thought brought back memories of going to my country’s bookstores (almost all of which have selections that are just so limited) and not finding a book I’m looking for. I would usually express some of this frustration to the person who works there: “What do you MEAN, none of your stores has it? Don’t you think you should carry it?”

This memory in turn led me to think of my recent experiences at the camera store where I found myself on the other end of this kind of situation. It’s useless to complain to me that the store does or does not carry this or that. Am I going to write a letter to the corporate office, saying something like “A customer thinks it’s outrageous that we don’t have this, and they’re right! You don’t know how to select our product list properly!”? No, I’m not.

Most recently, a customer wanted AAs for his Nikon SLR. In our battery area, we have tons of AAs, but they are almost all alkaline, and he wanted Nickel-Cadmium ones. I suggested rechargeable Nickel-Metal-Hydride ones, or maybe some that were Lithium-Ion… But no, “the power curve is all wrong, you could actually irreparably damage the motor when the battery’s effective voltage starts dropping… I’ve been taking pictures for a long time, and you just don’t use these in a nice SLR… How can you NOT HAVE Ni-Cad batteries and call yourself a camera store?” I checked on the computer to see if other stores had them or if I could order them, but they did not come up on the computer at all. “Tell your manager about this. You really should get those batteries”. Um, ok, I will.

It really comes down to how much – or how little – a clerk is an extension of the interests of the company, and of how limited our decision-making is, so we absorb the impact of an angry customer but do not have the power to actually do anything about it. If a customer is outraged at a price, at the lack of availability of an item, etc, then all I can do is agree with them, and in the process divorce myself from the company because there’s nothing I can do. I can say “You’re right, this is wrong”, but in the instant I do so I stop being The Company and start being a fellow photo enthusiast who is outraged but powerless. If I were to still be The Company, I would say “the decisions which led to this situation were deliberately made to optimize your experience with us and our profit from it and from such experiences of others”, or something. In other words, I either say “You’re right, and I wish there were something I could do, but they won’t listen to me any more than to you”, or “You’re wrong, and/or We don’t really care” – the latter being the gist of any correspondence any unhappy customer ever receives, if they receive anything at all, after writing a retail chain’s corporate offices with complaints.

So people at a bookstore will understandably not care and not do anything when I am frustrated brcause I can’t find the next novel, and the bookstore understandably does not want to put a low-demand item on the shelves.

Hard-to-find items only get harder and harder to find as control of retail is centralized into big chains that only sell what is hugely popular. Thank goodness for eBay.

posted by Remus