Silly sales patter
On my out of the grocery store today, I passed a salesman for the city newspaper. He was offering free papers (presumably to then draw you into a newspaper subscription pitch) to everyone going by. As I was leaving with baby and groceries in cart, he asked, “Hello, ma’am. Can I interest you in a free newspaper today?” I smiled slightly, replied, “No thank you,” and continued walking.
At that point I had pretty much expected the whole encounter to be over. However, a good three seconds later, by which time I was at least fifteen feet past him, I heard, “How about one for your younger sister… or younger brother there?”
It took another few seconds before I realized this was probably still directed towards me. While the flattery technique is very well known in sales, there are typically limits to it, and this was way over those limits.
- You just offered a free newspaper to a six-month-old infant. He certainly can not read it, and I am not likely to want him to eat it. (I suppose this could have led into a conversation about the toxicity of the paper and inks in the paper, but is that really where a salesman wants to go?)
- I’m thirty. The child is six months. It is not impossible that he is my sibling, but damn, that’s the biggest stretch I’ve ever seen. Try again when he’s fifteen and I wish I looked thirty.
On the whole, though, this was a very benign sales idiot; he just made me shake my head and laugh, rather than become infuriated and belligerent. This contrasts with a call from a “technician” who asked if our DSL was working; when we confirmed it was, he asked if we wanted it to be faster. That guy just made us mad. (And so, the next three times the same sales company phoned us about increasing our DSL speed, I asked lots of obscure technical questions that they didn’t understand and wasted their time.)
