OK, I'm not into the whole early morning rush to the stores to get a little bit off of a product thing. Come to think of it, I don't like the whole early morning thing the other 364 days of the year.
At around 2:30p.m., I was coming back from visiting relatives and Best Buy was on the way. I needed a new GPS. People may say I wanted and not needed a new GPS. Those would be the people who did not drive with me before I had one.
As I walked into the overcrowded store, I was greeted by tables and boxes of GPS units, but not the one I was looking for. I continued to the back of the store to the GPS section. After searching for a few minutes, I figured the unit I wanted probably sold out. An employee there was helping a customer pick out a GPS so I figured I'd ask him when he was done.
Here's where I feel bad for retail employees. The customer was going to each unit on display and asking him the features. Every time the employee told him the features of the unit, the customer felt the need to argue about whether or not the unit actually had that feature, or if it worked as described. After about five more units, the customer walked away. I say to the employee, "Don't you hate people who waste your time and argue with you about the product, then don't buy it?". The employee gave me a blank stare like the customer before me broke something in his brain. I continued, "I'm here to actually buy a GPS, do you have this model in stock?". The employee pauses for a second, "Uhhh, the store only has GPS's on these shelves right here, so if it's here we have it.". Really? The store only keeps them right here? What about the ones locked up underneath the shelves, the ones on the end caps or the ones on display up front?
I find another employee and ask him about the GPS. This guy is really competent. He tells me I can order the unit online, but that he has the same one on sale with a slightly smaller screen for about thirty dollars cheaper. Well the smaller one is the same size as the one I have, but has free maps and traffic for life, so sold.
Anyway, in NJ we have a law that, in a parking lot, cars must yield to pedestrians. It's the whole 2 tons of death and destruction vs the much less flesh and bones weight. So on my way out of the store with my new GPS, an older couple in a Mercedes feels that they should have right of way. The man says to his wife, with the window open, "Vy are dese people just wawking in front ov us?". I'm going to make a flash judgment on their nationality/religion here and say that if I were them, I would not get in a metal box made by Germans that had locks on it and was filled with gas. I sure as hell wouldn't be proud that I paid $60,000 plus for it.
So I gave him a dirty look and continued on to my car, leaving the mass hysteria of Black Friday behind me.
The problem is when people (and this isn't isolated to any particular group) have a sense of entitlement and lack of regard for others. It's a shame to stereotype though, it's just ignorance on both sides. I don't mean that disrespectfully but honestly -- whenever people really get to know eachother, stereotypes drop away to reveal the complexities of the real world.
ReplyDeleteI think most people unfortunately have a strange sense of entitlement. Look at our economy and our politics.
ReplyDeleteI also think people read things into writings that aren't necessarily there. There was no stereotyping, an accent is just a clue of a persons background. If it was another accent, I would have written about that too. As far as Mercedes, whose factories do you think pumped out the war machines? What car did Hitler drive? Should we really ignore 11 million people being snuffed out. If I made a product that did that today, would you forgive me tomorrow? How about if I targeted one group to the point that I wiped out 50% of them. Should they revere my other products?