How to Double Your Sales or Fat Guy Olympics

Red in the face, perspiration beading on his brow, blood pressure on the rise, when the sales associate seemed to appear out of nowhere.

“Can I help you?” 

The following account is from a close personal friend. This friend, who shall remain nameless, is by his own admission ‘a little’ overweight. He has also been the recipient of a knee replacement and is in line for yet another knee surgery.

On this particular day of retail gathering he was in search of a pair of jeans. His hunting grounds, a big box store. Normally in these establishments the only time an associate would offer to help is if it were blatantly obvious you preferred to be left alone. Today, somehow, was different. Perhaps it was the bulging vein on the neck or the labored breathing, but something drew the clerk near.

“Can I help you?”  : This was the routine, programmed greeting.

“Well I’m not sure. I need a pair of jeans. But I don’t know if you have my size. You see you have the skinny guy jeans up here on the top shelves and the fat guy ones near the floor. It seems to me that this backward. The skinny guy won’t have any trouble crawling around on the floor to make his selection while this is an Olympic event for us old fat guys. Why would they set it up this way?”   He pauses to catch his breath.

My, this was outside the clerks’ level of big box training…she would try and wing it. Had she known my friend she would never have ventured into this uncharted ground.

”Well it’s just store policy and I don't think they sell as many of the larger sizes.”

“No, I don’t suppose they do! Do you think that if we could actually find and reach what we needed that you might sell more of them?”

And so ends this tale of fat, gimpy guys and store clerks, of common sense versus retail sales.  

I’m not convinced that my friends’ idea was understood or passed on through the proper channels, because the last time I checked the arrangement was still, lean to large, in descending order.