Once upon a time I worked in retail. Let me rephrase that... I worked at a surf shop. I have heard the retail industry horror stories, and compared to that, the surf shop was a cruise in the Bahamas. An average work day consisted of sweeping sand off the entranceway, fitting kids into rashguards and watching the newest surf videos (so that I could make educated recommendations... of course).
As far as surf shops go, I was employed by the P Diddy of shops.
It's all about the perks: Free lunches, mega discounts, mandatory sunset watching... and best of all, a very generous commission. Pure Diddy genius, this commission. It made the crew competitive, yet kept them content. The crew was active, instead of complacent. We wanted to sell, and our bosses wanted that too.
Sales is all in the attitude. Take a slow day, very little foot traffic, a lot of sand sweeping, mass amounts of video watching and even more counting of minutes until sunset watching time. The workers are bummed, customers are ignored, therefore, potential sales opportunities are forever missed. Bummed bosses, bummed workers, bummed customers.
However, one big sale, I learned, will completely turn a day around. Even if it happened on the slowest day, one person will want to buy a board, and deck pad, and leash, and wax, and trunks, and sunglasses, and while you're at it bag some sunscreen too. One big sale and before you know the day has flown by and we're scooting people out the door to watch the sun go down with us, everyone happy as clams.
It's all in the attitude, and I learned to stay happy, treat every sale as if it were a big sale.
It's difficult to remember sometimes. We all have such great expectations of what our lives should be. Yet, we work at our crappy jobs, to pay our crappy bills, live in crappy apartments, our lives just complete crap.
And then I have to remind myself... to treat this as if I'm making a big sale.
(It's not all sunsets and clams, but it's not all that bad either.)
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