Mess Of A Salesman

By Joel Stein

I fear salespeople. They are cooler and better-looking and more confident than I am, and they say "Hi" as soon as I walk into their clothing store, a "Hi" that clearly means, "I don't remember inviting you, and if I had, I think I would have told you to wear something else." This is obviously all part of some sales technique that assumes that I believe I can one day have sex with the salespeople if I buy the right clothes. I am smarter than that.

But I have always suspected that the sales force at top-end clothing stores acts this way because the customers are even more obnoxious. That the customers, deep down, want to be treated like this, to be made to feel they are in the company of attitudinal equals. This is based on hours of sitting around clothing stores and staring at really hot women trying on boots, sometimes while waiting for my wife and sometimes just because I am a truly pathetic man. These women are often demanding, curt and dismissive. Which only makes them hotter.

To test this thesis, I persuaded Stella McCartney, fashion designer and daughter of Sir Paul McCartney, to let me work as a salesperson in her Manhattan store for a day. I chose Stella for several reasons, most of which have to do with the fact that I live a quarter-mile from her store. But apparently Stella has really nice clothes, nearly all of which cost more than $40, my official price ceiling for any article of clothing.

I arrived for work at noon on a Thursday, which I liked since it was a full hour later than I usually arrive at TIME. I was taken into the back room, where there were racks of clothes, stacks of invoices and, surprisingly, a box of Yankee Doodles on top of the microwave. I was handed a five-page booklet on the brand philosophy, which is "paradox." Nowhere in the five pages does it mention that trying to sell clothes while being mean to customers is a paradox, but I wrote that in.

Within moments I learned a couple of key things. One was that your first day is no time to take over the sound system. Retail director Brendan Wittlinger keeps a tight rein on the stack of CDs, none of which were by the Beatles, Wings or even Band Aid. Basically, Brendan's style is to play that Missy Elliott album again and again until I want to kill him. I also learned that I was a little off when I decided to wear a suit and tie.

I tried to pump myself up for a sale, which I figured required knowing where the cash register was. It turns out nice stores don't have cash registers; they just take your credit card. They also don't have sale signs, although in this case there was a 60%-off sale on almost everything in the store. We just told people when they came in. The thing was, almost nobody was coming in.

My three fellow salespeople were shockingly cool. The day before, I was told, they had sold clothes to Kyra Sedgwick and Jessica Seinfeld's stylist. Also that day, one salesperson, after seeing a woman mistakenly try on a skirt as a tube top, sold it to her that way. It takes some ingenuity to sell clothes. I'm told that if you act a little bit gay, women will let you see them naked in the dressing room. I'd be very good at that part of the job.

When a few customers did come in, I said "Hi" to them and told them about the sale. Unfortunately for my thesis, they seemed really friendly. Even the 21-year-old who was putting together a four-figure outfit for her friend's birthday party turned out to be kind of sweet. The only person I didn't like was Sandra Bullock's stylist, who was incredibly serious about her task of finding the actress something for her appearance on David Letterman's show. My referring to something as being "not Bullocky enough" was completely ignored. In fact, I was completely ignored--she'd deal only with the manager, Tiziana Lanza. This may have had to do with Lanza's knowing something about clothes.

At 6 p.m. I gave up, not having made one sale, got one rude remark or seen one woman in her underwear. Lanza told me I was a bit "uptight" and shouldn't "walk like a robot." I was starting to rethink my thesis about the salespeople being nicer than the customers.

I think the deal is that Stella McCartney is young and hippie-ish and laid back, and she gets the staff to be that way too, though I'm not entirely sure how this is accomplished by a five-page booklet on paradox. But the friendliness of the staff makes the customers feel unguarded, more relaxed and more likely to open their wallets. Other stores are stuck in a cycle of cruelty, like some horrible dysfunctional marriage. Speaking of which, I inadvertently mentioned the 60%-off sale to my wife. Three days and $600 later, I became the worst-paid sales assistant in history. They didn't even give me a staff discount. Fashion is a cruel business.