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Strange Re-Tales: Gotta Have It!

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Retail sales associates have a term of endearment for the people who often visit the store, ask lots of time of the various salespeople, but seldom, if ever, buy anything: Tire kickers.

Many times they visit the store on such a regular basis that they’re practically a fixture, similar to how neighborhood bars and taverns have “regulars.”

You know, sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.

The big difference of course is that bars make money from their regulars because they, you know, order drinks.

Veteran salespeople make an effort to dodge the well-known tire kickers, often pawning them on to the younger, eager-beaver salespeople so the older, wiser salespeople can take their cigarette break in peace.

I always made an effort to at least humor the tire kickers because I recognized that in many cases what hampered their buying decision was extreme indecisiveness.

They’d pivot on one or two key features and agonize over which one to get. They needed a friend, someone who could help.

Once, we had a regular tire kicker named Willy, an older gentleman, who coveted a new 50-inch DLP rear-projection set.

I spoke with him about it on two or three occasions, and since he’d latched on to me like a baby duck, I’d better make an effort to close him on a TV.

The sticking point for him was the then-nascent DVI connection.

“But what about DVI?” he kept asking, and every time I’d give him the same answer, that it was still a year away, or more (crossing my commission salesman fingers behind my back).

Finally, finally I nailed him down on a model of 50-inch DLP that he liked. It only had component video inputs, but man it had a lot of component video inputs.

He paid for it on a Tuesday and I made arrangements for a Saturday delivery.

Two days later he walks back in and asks to cancel it.

“I been thinking, Lee” he says, “I just gotta have that DVI. I’d better wait!”

Fine, I agreed, a man’s gotta have what he’s gotta have. I cheerfully refunded his transaction, and made a little note in my client book.

Eight months later I called him up, and sold him the later model that now included a DVI input.

The joke was ultimately on Willy, because not long afterwards HDMI because the digital standard for TV sets and DVI was as dead as the dodo.

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