---
title: "A short story about serving customers in a retail store"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/serving-customers-in-a-retail-store
published: 2010-03-26
summary: "A colleague walks into a shop of expensive bags, asks two simple questions and walks out in a foul mood. No feng shui will save a shop like that."
---

# A short story about serving customers in a retail store

Yesterday a colleague told me a rather instructive story. Every now and then she drops into a shop not far from our office. The shop sells expensive bags, gloves and that kind of thing. Expensive is relative, of course: the bags cost about 3,000 hryvnias, she said.

So one day she went in again and was looking at the new arrivals (I don't know whether she has ever bought anything there, but I know she or her friends could).\
She asks the sales assistant: "Will this bag hold its shape on its own?" (Meaning without the cardboard frame stuffed inside it.)

The assistant mutters something irritably in reply.

Anya, which is my colleague's name, a little upset, goes on looking at the bags. Under the next one she finds a one-hryvnia note:

"Oh, there's a hryvnia lying here!\
...\
Or is it supposed to be there?"

"If it's there, it's supposed to be there!" the assistant snaps, even more irritably.

In the end Anya walks out of the shop without a word, her mood completely ruined.

Moral: no feng shui will help you if your salespeople learned customer service at the greasy spoons around the train station.