Member-only story
I’m Pretty Sure Brick-and-Mortar Stores Are Going to Disappear
All my adult life, I have worked in retail. I worked at a Kroger first. I worked at a few different places, and then I worked at Walmart. Then, I worked at a GNC, and now I work at a health-food store called Grains and Greens. I love this job because it gets me out in the public. My boss is the nicest guy and completely unpretentious and unusual enough to be likeable. He’s tall and big and he’s got long hair, a beard, and piercings in his ears.
You’re probably familiar with GNC. They sell sports nutrition products. That job was a struggle, but not in the usual way. It was not hard to do the work. The management was the problem. This isn’t a rant about “the Man”. I suspect the management was… confuzzled, I guess. They wanted me to be better at selling the product. We had to watch all of these video modules that trained us on how to be a good salesperson.
At first, I thought they would be total bovine feces. But, they weren’t. I specifically recall parts of the training being about things like how to read a customer’s body language and develop rapport. The modules said that if a customer doesn’t make eye contact for very long, the only thing you can do is smile and let them shop on their own. You could also check in with them after they have looked around for a little while.
