Picture this: you’re coming back from a half-time break of your favorite Union sport. For the purposes of this activity in imagination, your favorite sport is football, and you’re watching it on Union’s home turf. As you approach the field, you see a poor, lowly, clearly freshman-look-
ing girl decked out in Union gear, preparing to convince everyone she meets that they should be equally decked out for this very special occasion (a random home game in October). The girl is pulling a rack of Union merchandise behind her, completely unaware of the path that the back half of hangers will want to take at her next turn. This rack is pretty heavy (as you surmise, judg-
ing by the amount of heavy sweatshirts hanging off of it), but the girl moves swiftly through the crowds of tailgates and loitering parents to get to her station right outside the stadium. As if it isn’t evident enough, this girl does not want to be bothered.

 So, I ask you: what do you do? If your answer is literally anything that isn’t to bother the girl, I love you, and this article is not directed at you in any way, shape, or form. However, I’m sure there’s a good amount of people out there who would bother the girl. That poor girl. If it isn’t obvious by now, that girl is me, which is also why I do know that there are certain people out there who see no problem interrupting the aforementioned situation. 

This story provided above, unfortunately, hasn’t been fabricated just to prove my point. At that home football game on that Saturday, I was bothered by such people not once, but many times. Walking to the stadium, I approached a group of parents who stopped my Z-rack and me in my tracks, wanting to purchase some of the clothes that I would be setting up in just a few short moments as soon as I got to my selling table. Of course, I did tell the parents this, but that didn’t stop them from inquiring about prices, sizing, and stock of certain items. For the record, I am glad that these parents were taking an interest in supporting their child’s school Bookstore, and I absolutely would never turn down a sale (learned that one from my parents), but was I in any position to make that sale right there in the middle of the street? No. Of course not. 

I also told the parents this, which they responded to with my most despised line in all of business. If you’ve worked in sales, specifically in retail, at any point in your life, I can guarantee you’ve heard this line and might find it equally as infuriating. As I (as politely as I could) turned these parents away from my mobile rack of clothes and towards our table set up outside the stadium, I heard it: “Well then, if you don’t have the card reader on you, I guess it must be free!” I have an immense hatred for this statement. I’ve always heard people in sales and service mention people doing gestures like this, but it suddenly became too real as soon as I started working here at the bookstore. 

What makes you think it would be free, genuinely? Do you think I’d cover the cost of it? Yeah, as if. This work-study paycheck can barely afford my bi-weekly trip to Walmart—I’m not dropping fifty bucks on a sweater for this random man in the street who just happened to catch me at the “right time.” If I’m not paying for it, and you, the customer, aren’t paying for it, then who do you expect to cover the cost of this piece of merchandise? Certainly not my boss either, as I’m sure he has much better things to do than cover the costs of your Union College windbreaker because you can’t take ten steps over across the street to where the card reader actually is. If I sound overly spiteful, it’s because I am. I just can’t understand how someone could think that doing something like this doesn’t make them annoying. 

If you’re one of these people reading this right now, or if you’ve ever even contemplated doing this, in the slight chance that it would work, let me ask you: where do you work? If you drop this line currently, I’m assuming you’re of an older generation, which probably means you work somewhere professional with somewhat of a higher status in your company. So, tell me, would you want someone walking into your place of business and asking you to give them whatever you’re working on for free? No, of course you wouldn’t! If you’re an engineer, imagine putting your heart and soul into something I probably couldn’t differentiate from a crumb without my glasses on, and then someone walking up to you and joking about taking it for absolutely nothing in exchange. If you’re in insurance, imagine someone phoning you up and asking if you could give them an entire plan for free, all costs covered. Even if you’re a fast food worker, you’ve got to imagine putting some effort into the meal, packaging it all nicely, and going to bring it to the paying customer…and then getting intercepted by someone who wants to just take it and give you nothing for it. 

If you can’t imagine this situation ever happening, good! It shouldn’t! Assuming something’s free just because you as a customer randomly had a stroke of luck and are being spiritually rewarded doesn’t happen in any other field, so, I ask myself, why must it happen to me? All of this to be said, I will continue to serve these customers (as long as they do
pay) because, say it with me: a sale is a sale. However, if you’re reading this and you have personally made this comment or similar ones to a poor young adult retail worker, please reconsider. Take a step back, maybe read this article again (hang it up on your fridge, for all I care), and reevaluate what a simple (stupid) question like this can do.