"This is the best helmet on the market," said the fresh-faced, painfully young, terminally bored sales associate, clerk, retail assistant.
"But I’d really like to try on some others," replied my Perfect Partner.
"But it’s the best helmet on the market," she repeated, adding for emphasis, "I wear this helmet."
Okay, let’s be fair, it was Tuesday, the store wasn’t particularly crowded, the other extra-small size helmets weren’t within fingertip range, it was Tuesday… oh, wait a minute, did I already say that?
But, in a nutshell, that microexchange, that bit of commerce that didn’t take place once it became clear the personal shopping aide wasn’t going to expend the energy required to (a) listen to what her potential customer was saying, (b) go out of her way to offer alternatives, or (c) give a rat’s ass whether she made a sale or not, probably says more about the challenges ahead than Ed’s suggestion we put on a happy face and stop writing about contentious issues in the local media.
Ed is Ed Pitoniak. Until a couple of years ago Ed was the exec in charge of Wicked Cool Ideas at the MotherCorp. I think his job description read something along the lines, "Think up really wickedly cool things we can do to attract and entertain guests while they’re at our resorts." I was envious of Ed’s job description, even though he worked like a plowhorse and was so well known on some airlines they had a seat with his name on it.
In fact, even though he’s been gone for a couple of seasons, Ed’s still on my top five list of guys I’ll drop what I’m doing any time to go have a refreshing beverage with and discuss life, business, the ills of the world or whether Soylent Green was a more accurate depiction of mankind’s future than, say, Star Wars .
And to be both honest and fair to the man, I didn’t hear his speech last week at the Chamber of Commerce Spirit luncheon. (Is luncheon a really weird word or is it just me this morning?) I would have gone to the mid-day meal event (even weirder) but for the fact that 24 hours earlier my very gentle, very skilled dentist – gratuitous plug for Dr. Jay – hooked the winch from his Jeep up to a molar in my mouth and tugged ‘til it popped out, leaving me with a hole too small for a full-sized cigar but large enough to leak soup, coffee and pretty much anything else I put in there for a day or two afterward, activity you should definitely avoid when attending a CofC noon meal event. (I give up.)
Clearly, the helmet-shopping example above falls within Ed’s clarion call to higher levels of service which, if we’re honest with ourselves – and assuming we shop locally at least occasionally – we’ll have to admit is spotty at best and downright abysmal far too often.
But, in a microcosm, it’s also indicative of the difficulty Whistler is going to have resolving its fall from grace.
Here’s the dilemma. I don’t think its too controversial to say one tends to get better service in retail shops that are locally owned, not part of a chain and where the owners spend a fair amount of time inside the store, working side-by-side with their staff.
I can’t, for example, remember a time I ever received indifferent or unknowledgeable service at McCoo’s, Sport Stop, The Escape Route, Wild Willie’s, Keir Fine Jewellery and The Daily Planet. As a result, I tend to shop at those stores… a lot.
I have, on the other hand, repeatedly wandered into other stores, stood around looking confused before the wall o’ gloves, bindings, jackets and accessories while people I think might have been staff held forth with other people who might have been staff – or might just have been friends – regaling them with tales of the previous night’s escapades at one or another of Whistler’s hot night spots. Not surprisingly, I wandered out empty handed.
It’s not important which stores they were. It is important they tend to be stores owned by large companies – both local and not – with managers and staff that tend to turn over quickly. This is not to say all chains give bad service; but the exceptions tend to prove the rule more than call it into question.
The paradox is this: In a town that relied on the Greater Fool Theory – blind reliance on an endless supply of greater fools to replace the ones that go broke or get fed up and leave – to fuel its rise to greatness, there are still far too many people who seem to believe that theory is equally applicable as we struggle into the mature phase of our life cycle.
It won’t.
Not paradoxically, there seems to be a very high concentration of GFT adherents among the commercial landlord population. I’m not certain why exactly that is but I’m also not certain greed isn’t the overriding explanation.
When you put the dilemma together with the paradox you end up with a tried and true formula for mediocrity: landlords raising rents to the level where it’s uneconomic for locally-owned stores providing great service to continue operating because the landlords’ undying belief in the GFT tells them there will always be someone willing to pay the higher rents even if that someone is a chain store with high staff turnover and lousy, indifferent service.
I think pilots call it a flat spin. It usually ends in a flaming crash, death and destruction.
I used to naively think the root of the problem was absentee, corporate landlords like the Ontario teachers’ or municipal employees’ pension funds, faceless entities with no real ties to our community or interest in whether we succeeded or failed, bean counters whose only focus in life was ROI.
But then I went to look at skis at one of my favourite ski stores only to find out their downstairs ski shop had moved upstairs, crowding into the space where soft goods used to be. When I asked why they said, "big rent increase." Then I remembered their landlords were long-time, well-established and doing-quite-nicely-thanks-for-asking locals.
So when Ed says our community needs a "unity of vision," I’m a little worried. I’m not certain that’s possible when the vision unifying many in our community seems to be everybody looks out for number one.
For my part, I’ll make a concerted effort to stop sniping at the leader of the free world, the pres of my country of birth. I’ll leave that job to the more knowledgeable columnists at the New York Times and the 70 per cent of the U.S. population who wonder if he’s completely lost his mind.
