Snap Judgments

Like most people, I tend to appraise my customers as soon they come through the door and then make assumptions very quickly about them. Thanks to years of experience and a massive intellect, I'm usually correct. These assumption are then used to try to tailor whatever I'm going to try to sell to that customer. There's no point trying to flog a credit card or savings account to some dole scrounging pikey. In fact, there's very little chance of selling anything to some of those customers for two reasons:

1. I don't sell booze and fags.

2. They don't tend to buy stuff, they just take it.

The particular snap judgement I'm going to blog about here is one that I never actually had confirmed as right but I'd be willing to bet a fairly substantial sum that it was totally correct.

A morbidly obese woman waddled in the other day. She was clutching a parcel. I sent it off for her, did the usual transaction spiel and then she waddled over to the sweets counter and grabbed two fuck-off huge bars of chocolate and a large bag of sweets. This was rounded off with an oh so predictable bottle of diet coke.

So far, so normal.

The one thing that stuck out as being a bit unusual was the parcel she was sending. It was a mail order return to a fitness company.

Now, I'm guessing that she wasn't sending it back as she'd worn it out through over use. More likely she was returning it cos the very fact that she owned it didn't make her lose any weight.

Was I right or what?