Today I was asked to fill in for a vacationing associate in the electrical department. The very though of it had me intimidated.
In plumbing, I don’t fret too much anymore about giving customers bad advice or about letting them go off with the fixes they insist on, even though I know that they absolutely won’t work. After all, we’re dealing with water and I figure that the worst that can happen is that people or property might get a little damp. Even with gas fixtures, the chances of things getting out of hand are relatively slim.
There was that one time, however, when I was sure that the barely English speaking guy was going to hook up the fryer in a Chinese restaurant with some highly flammable thin plastic tubing. I remember watching the news that night to see if there was a horrible explosion and fire at the
Me and electricity don’t mix. One of my first home improvement projects was a botched attempt to re-wire a ceiling fan. I could have sworn I turned off the breaker, but when my screwdriver crossed the circuitry, I awoke flat on my back, at the bottom of a four foot ladder, looking straight up at big, black scorch marks on the ceiling, while coming to in a fog of ozone. Before I could even check to see if my spinal cord had been severed, my mind screamed; “Shit! My wife’s gonna kill me when she sees that burn mark on the ceiling!”
Whenever I am asked an electrical question, I remember the line uttered by Michael Keaton in the movie classic “Mr. Mom”. For those of you younger than 30, or those of you that don’t remember the 80’s, in the movie Keaton plays a laid off auto executive who is forced to stay at home with the kids while his wife, played by Teri Garr, goes off to earn the daily bread. With his ego in tatters, Keaton’s character begins taking on home improvement projects in a botched attempt to reclaim his manhood. In a display of misplaced testosterone, he comes barreling through a hole in a wall with a chainsaw growling in his hands. When asked what his up to he utters, “oh, just adding on a room or two.” When asked by another male character if he’s going to wire the room with 220, and Keaton answers; “220, 221, whatever it takes.” I’m sure his next line would have been “shit, my wife’s gonna kill me”, but his was a movie, not real life.
Management at my store is famous for telling associates to that they need to step outside of their comfort zone (usually followed by the retort “What the hell did you do that for!!!?”), so I begrudgingly took on the assignment in the valley of death, commonly known as aisles 1 through 6 in electrical.
Fortunately, my first hundred or so customers where even more clueless about how electricity works than a young Ben Franklin. I easily cruised through my first four hours by using a trick I have turned into an art form over my long retail career. I simply avoided answering questions by employing deflection.
To unarm a customer with difficult questions, you simply start asking them different questions that they can’t possibly answer. It’s a type of verbal judo where you use the customer’s inquiry against them, until they just give up trying to buy anything and go home to gather more information.
I had one customer who asked early in my shift for an outside light bulb that came with those tiny little bases known as candelabra. He complained that the bulbs he had been using burnt out in less than a month. He wanted to know if we had any special candelabra bulbs that could be used outside. This was a question I was unable to answer.
To deflect, I asked him if the problem might be caused by a damaged weatherproof seal in the fixture. I asked if he knew of any damage to the weatherproof covering. He said he didn’t know, but that he would go home and check it out.
See, problem solved.
I have no idea if there is such a thing as an outdoor candelabra bulb, and I couldn’t find any on the shelf, so I simply deflected the question with another question. He later returned to the store and bought an entirely new light fixture which we both assumed would have the weatherproof seal in tact. The store saw a $4.99 light bulb sale increase to a $69.00 fixture sale and the customer thinks I know what I’m talking about.
Everybody wins.
Another customer asked me to help him find “Can Lights”. I don’t know a can light from a barrel light so I simply walked him around the department until he pointed out the can lights to me. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my store carries about 50 ,000 different configurations of what, to the untrained eye, looks like a simple hole in the ceiling with a light bulb screwed into it.
Can lights (as I found out by quickly and secretly scanning a shelf full of stuff I didn’t even know existed) come in a bewildering number of sizes, each with an equally overwhelming number of ways that they can be secured to the area above your head. They come in 4, 5, and 6 inch diameters with all sorts of wires sticking out of them and different heavy metal brackets to hold them up. Each has a specific function and is designed for a specific type of instillation environment. This was my salvation.
I am completely ignorant about which type goes where, but the customer doesn’t know that. He then asks; “which can light do I need?” I don’t know the answer to that question, but do I reveal my ignorance? Not on your life! I simply deflect. “What size of light were you thinking about using?” I say while pointing out the 4, 5 and 6 inch choices. “I don’t know”, he replies.
I then go in for the kill. “Well, how big is the room and what types of activities are you planning for it? The size of the can light depends on the square footage your trying to light and the height of the ceiling.”
My bet is that the customer has no clue as to the square footage and even if he does have some idea about the room’s basic dimensions, he certainly can’t calculate the cube footage, which is why I threw in the factoid about the ceiling height. ”I better go home and measure”, he says dejectedly. HI-YA!! verbal karate chop to the solar plexus.
I spend the rest of the day putting returned items back onto the shelf. I am struck by the shear number of items that come back to the electrical department. I was sure that plumbing saw the most returned items as customers find out that there is a big difference between ¾ and ½ inch pipe and spouses weren’t happy with the $45 plastic kitchen faucet that the husband bought (“What’s wrong with it? All the damn thing has to do is turn the water off, why do you need to spend $435?”). Electrical gives plumbing a real run for the money. I put back ceiling fans, switches, breakers, and a whole host of things that I could not identify.
The most returned item by far, however was light bulbs. People simply have no idea what size or type of bulb they need. They think they know, then they come in the front door and see the enormous array of bulbs we have in the store. The light bulb section consumes an area half the size of the department. It is eight feet high, runs for 55 feet in length and contains at least 35,000 separate items. Not multiple packs of items mind you but 30,000 different devices to give off light. When seen from space, I’m sure the light bulb aisle in my store is hard to discern from the great wall of China.
They keep the light bulbs near the front of the store, not to make it easier for the customers to find, but to improve the reception on their cell phones as they desperately call home to find out exactly what type of bulb they need. The shear size of the section, combined with the overwhelming number of ways you can make a wrong decision, drives many customers to madness. Most don’t even try to navigate this part of the store with out guidance, and today that meant walking through the shadows of doom that are light bulbs with me.
All the information most customers need to make the right choices are directly in front of them, or more accurately, right there in their own two hands. While some customers will venture into our “Light Bulb Jungle” unarmed and to their peril, most will bring in an example of what they need in the form of a recently burned out bulb.
All I have to do, as the helpful associate, is to take the bulb from their hands and begin reading the boxes on the shelf. I look for anything that bears a resemblance to the bulb I’m carrying and see if the numbers and descriptions on the box match what’s printed somewhere on the bulb. That gets me 95% home. Then it’s up to the customer do decide if they want soft white light, natural light, spot light, 30 par light, 20 par light, grow light, fish-tank light, incandescent light, florescent light, halogen light, cool white light or one of those yellow lights that don’t attract bugs. See, that isn’t so hard, is it?
While in light bulbs, I get to pontificate on one of my favorite topics, the idiocy of using the new compact florescent lights to help save the environment.
The theory goes that compact florescent lights, commonly referred to as CFL’s, help the environment by reducing energy usage. CFL’s are much more efficient than regular incandescent lights because they put out more light while using only a third of the electricity. You save both money and the planet by lowering your electric bill and the saved electricity leads to lower carbon emissions. I have no problem with that because as near as I can tell, the facts on energy savings, when comparing CFL’s to their incandescent counterparts, seem indisputable. Where the argument runs off the rails is in the whole “Good for the Environment” logic.
I’m a big believer that our use of fossil fuels like petroleum and coal are doing some strange things to the environment. I sitting here in
To further vent my spleen, CFL’s have a big draw back as far as environmental friendliness is concerned…you can’t throw them away!
Check out the package for any CFL, you’ll see that you have to take them to an authorized disposal site. That’s not a characteristic generally attributed to a product that’s supposed to be a pal to the environment. CFL’s contain trace amounts of mercury, one of the most highly toxic substances on the planet. Mercury, once released into the ground or water, never goes away, and it causes sever brain damage to small children. Now the Mercury in one bulb is not going to turn your kid into a vegetable, but once 20 or so Billion of them get into land fills, I think we’re going to have a hard time feeling good about our selves when a future generations ask us what the hell we were thinking.
To expand on the Green-washing, CFL’s work because they are filled with a gas that glows when an electrical current passes through it. Those gases are known carcinogens, something you definitely don’t think of as earth friendly. Packaging also carries warnings that if a CFL breaks, you are not supposed to clean it up right away. You are supposed to leave the room after opening all the windows to change out the now toxic air. Once the room is ventilated, you are supposed to clean up what’s left of your green lighting and take the broken pieces to a hazardous waste disposal area. Green my ass!!
People are flocking into my store to buy these things and they are confused about them. CFL’s have only been widely available as a replacement for incandescents for about five years. Since many of the customers that come into my store are still vigorously debating the virtues of VHS vs. Betamax, it will be quite some time before they are aware of the choices they have in home lighting options. So when faced with a decision they are totally ill equipped to make, people will ask the man in the nametag for his opinion.
They are surprised when I tell them that I don’t really like CFL’s. They look at me with shocked disbelief and ask me why. It‘s then I tell them that I don’t usually like to buy disposable products that I can’t throw away.
They look at me, then they look at the pretty pictures of a pristine forest shown on the package for a CFL and they are even more confused. “But I thought CFL’s were good for the environment?” They ask. “They are”, I tell them, “just so long as you don’t ever plan to throw them away.” Then I show them the statement on the package and they have a tough time processing how a purchase that is supposed to save the planet can be so damaging to it that you can’t throw them away without irreversibly poisoning your drinking water.
I’d like to say that I was able to use my time in the electrical department to champion the cause of saving the planet, but unfortunately, most of the customers who asked my advice disregarded it and bought the CFL’s anyway. In a typical fashion, the associate is seen as the expert on whatever the customer wants to buy until he tells them the truth. They aren’t about to let some guy with a name tag ruin the sense of self satisfaction they were planning on having by purchasing a light bulb that’s good for the planet. Even if it ultimately leads to making the place we call home just a little bit more toxic for future generations
I’m only an expert on what I sell if I agree with a customer who has already told me that they don’t know what they are talking about. Go figure. Most customers would rather live in their ignorance and take the energy saving, planet saving until you don’t need it any more product that contributes to brain damage in children, and carry it home to their 3,500 square foot Mc Mansion in their 2.3 mile per gallon Escalade; warm in the fact that their purchase almost saved the planet… and that guy in electrical was a putz.
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