I worked as a saleswoman for more than five years and this is how I would like customers to behave in the store (especially during sales).

With the starting gun for the January sale last Saturday, the shops are overcrowded. It doesn’t matter what time of day you go, because at least during these first two weeks, they will always be fine. Is corporate shopping frenzy on sales which is repeated year after year, we all see from the outside as customers: “the cashiers take a long time to get paid”, “the shop assistants don’t want to go in to find sizes”, “the queue of changing rooms is endless”, “they are bad garments with a label”… Do these sentences ring a bell? I’m sure we’ve all said them, at least once.

And it’s that we all have that vision as sales customers, but,how the saleswomen experience it from the inside? Empathizing with someone else is not easy.especially in the tyranny that “the customer is always right” in which we live and because of which we often lose empathy towards the other, But it is necessary. Especially in a time as demanding as sales. Although today I am lucky enough to be able to say that I am a journalist and live from it, but more than five years i worked as a salesman in clothing stores: Inditex, Tendam, Parfois, Etam…

It practically does not matter which clothing store you think of, because it is very likely that he worked in it. And if not, in some very similar. Also in all possible functions: cashier, customer service in the store, fitting rooms, warehouse… So yes, I can say that I know a lot about working with the public. For this reason, following the debate that sparked last week with the news that Zara was going to ask customers to hang their clothes in the dressing room, it seemed like a good idea to have a practical guide to how we would like the sales associates to be our customers, especially now in the selling season. It is not a criticism or complaint as such, but an ode to politeness and empathy.

No, we don’t want customers to clean up the store because that’s what we’re here for, but there are some minimums that if all customers did, they would achieve a much more orderly environment in all respects. It’s not about folding shirts or trousers down to the millimetre, but about if we take something but ultimately don’t want it, leave it as close as possible to where we took it in the first place. or from pick up things when they fall to the floor.

One of the most repeated complaints at checkouts is that the price on the label does not match the price the terminal displays when we scan the barcode. Something that usually goes hand in hand with a bad face. I come in peace and to shed some light on this subject: the labels are applied one by one by hand by the sales staff, so after posting three hundred tags it’s very possible we got one wrong. And nothing happens, it does not mean that we deliberately want to make you pay more: we see it together in the box and find a solution for both parties. No drama.

The phrase “is the saleswoman didn’t even want to go in to see if there were sizes” is one of the most repeated in sales. The stores run at their maximum capacity during those weeks and all sales stock that comes in is usually brought to the store almost immediately to be sold. So no, it’s not that we don’t want to go to the store for sizes, it is in 99% of cases, all items of clothing are outside (and yes, my apologies in advance for that 1% of times there was a size in it but it didn’t give us the life to get in).

If the queues in the changing rooms are usually endless queues, then in sales they multiply insanely. And this is exactly why it is necessary to keep track of garments that can be passed on to fitting rooms. If there is already a line with five clothes per person, can you imagine what would happen if we let everyone in with the clothes they wanted? It would take hours to get in. And yes, it costs nothing to turn over unwanted clothing and hand it to the mid-level clerk.

Okay, I didn’t mean to end with a positivist message like all the others, but I couldn’t help it. In the end, sales associates spend many hours in stores, missing out on parties with friends or family (okay, this usually happens in a lot of jobs, but now we’re focusing exclusively on this one), and sometimes it can be both physically and mentally exhausting. Not to mention the sales objectives behind it, which we as customers don’t see, but which the sales associates keep in mind all the time. So no, It doesn’t cost anything to be kind and remember that a shop assistant is, after all, human like uswith their problems and concerns.