Tokyo and tech through the eyes of a split pea

Chart Topping 101

Funny how the mind batches up numbers; my feeling during the day was that I was making a number of small sales — at least compared to Saturday. So when my shift ended, I figured I came close, if not topped, the previous day. Surprisingly I sold a good 8% more today. I’ve already passed the SMOJ goal of 2 million yen total in the 30 days of training, so I’m quite satisfied. It’s quite a high, actually; I’m still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, only finally taking lunch when requested to, and never taking a break in the afternoon. Thing is, weekends are always the busiest, so I figure I’ll just rest during the slow days in the middle of the week.

Today’s sales were quite a challenge though. I ‘ve always been on the customer side, haggling the sales-person for a little more discount. Always a bit of an eye-opener being on “the other side” as they say. Today’s most obnoxious trio was a husband and wife team with a father from Israel. It got to the point where I was throwing up my arms telling the wife (the biggest haggler of them all) that I needed to have something to put food on the table. Her comment? (With an odd Eastern European accent) “What you need food for? You so fat already! You no need any mo’ food!” Damn right I didn’t complete that sale — I tossed them off to the floor manager, who subsequently spent another hour (no exaggeration) haggling with them.

Another challenging group of 4 (two sets of couples) were from Indonesia; thankfully they applied a little less pressure, but were still a challenge. These folks, as well as the Israelis, ended up paying in USD, which was interesting. Today’s rate was 114.75/$, and when paytime came for over $1k, they pulled out wads of $100 bills. I guess it was just more an amusing site, especially in Tokyo.

A lot of the sales were of the cheapest video cameras, which were flagged as special deals until they were sold out. It surprises me how little many customers care about the quality of footage produced. The hot-cake cameras are around half a mega-pixel, which (though subjective a comment) looks quite bad. Even though it’s cheap, the quality is so bad they’ll just end up buying another slightly higher resolution model in a year, which will make their total purchases more than if they’d just bought a higher-end one now to last them a few years.

It also surprises me how mislead a lot of the tourists are when it comes to cost. At least 5-10 times a day I’m told, “…but I thought because it’s made in Japan, it’s cheaper!” Yeah, maybe for the local models with only Japanese instructions and no international warranty. Once you have to start supporting international standards from NTSC/PAL differences, 100-240V instead of just 100V, service centers around the globe, and the major languages such as English, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian, costs don’t just increase a few pennies. It’s too bad so many trivialize the International Warranty, as if it’s some minor cost to the vendor…

Speaking of trivialize, it became extremely clear how English — at least as a spoken language — is treated so when a female native English speaker requested my assistance when I was finished with another customer. I was dealing with a duo from England, so this lady probably overhead me chatting it up with these guys on some technical details and haggling over prices. All the other store folk can chat it up a bit in English, but it’s been bastardized to a point that a native speaker would rather wait.

Oh yeah, and thanks Andrew and Chris Goggans for stoppin’ by!