1. The Shoe Store
I bought a new pair of shoes, yesterday. It was a strange experience.
When we walked into the place, the smell of leather was wonderful. Unlike our previous forays into three (count ‘em, three) old-guard departments stores, this place felt genuine. They were selling shoes, period. Ok, I think there were some other leather things, but this was just a shoe store. They didn’t try to be anything else. As a marketing strategy, it worked.
For example, here we were standing near a shelf at the front of the store. Trudy looked at some boots and said to me, “Wow. I would marry you if you wore these!” (It was primarily due to the influence of the fair and industrious Trudy that we were on this quest in the first place. I can tell you with some conviction that marrying her was the best decision of my life, and somehow I managed to score that without those boots.)
Ok. So this was a place that even we could enjoy. But still, it was a bit strange…
2. The Shoe Store Process
I found a pair I liked.
“May I try these in 10 1/2?” I asked.
The woman tapped on a hand-held (Honeywell) device.
I walked off to look at other shoes. When I turned around, she was still there. I was puzzled, but I gave her more time.
She just stood there. Perhaps they were out of my size. Maybe she was just giving me some space before she told me.
“Are you out of my size?”
“Oh no,” she said. “They’re coming.”
They’re coming. That’s odd, I was thinking to myself. And at that very moment a door opened in the back of the store. A man emerged holding a box. He walked up with an odd smile on his face. He handed the box to the woman and returned to the back.
The shoes weren’t quite right, so I asked for a different pair. The subsequent process was the same: the woman went nowhere; some time elapsed; the man again emerged with a box.
This time, he was closer to me. So I reached out for the box.
But he didn’t want to hand them to me. I could see it in his eyes. There was panic hidden behind his smiling facade. He looked at me, then at her, back at me. Finally he reached around me and handed the box to her.
3. How It Appeared
I get it. There are laces to be laced, stuffing to be unstuffed. Don’t trouble the customer with trivialities. I get that.
But here’s the thing of it. We were the only ones there, and I was the only customer.
In addition to the saleswoman and this young, silent shoe-transporter who evidently spends most of his working hours hidden in the bowels of the stock shelfs, there was a manager/salesman in the store, too. One customer and a standard store process that requires three people to service him.
The manager spent much of his time at the cash register, typing away at the keyboard, singing along with the hip, piped-in music. The woman was tethered to a handheld cash register satellite. And there was this silent drone-of-a-man who retrieved and delivered boxes from an area in the back.
I pictured the area behind that door as a vast, dark array of shelves stretching out in all directions. I pictured him stepping onto a platform as soon as he received a get-this-box summons, being whisked off to the box’s coordinates and transported back, stepping off the platform and walking out into the full light of the salesroom, box in hand.
The shoe store felt strange, but I ended up buying the shoes.
… Maybe I need to get out a little more.