One fine Saturday I was out with some friends hitting up shoe stores. I needed some new kicks for hooping it up with the youngsters. We wandered into one store where they must have been offering big bonuses for sales because we got swarmed by employees. It felt like being accosted by a mob of referees. I was wearing some old leather slip-on shoes. They were nice and scuffed; just the way I like them. I have a long standing dislike for shoe polish and I just like the way leather shoes look when they get old and worn out, so sue me.
One of the salesmen was pushing some special shoe polish. He went on about how you can put it on once and it would last for months. He explained that he used it himself and it made it so that he hardly ever had to polish his shoes. I didn’t really pay too much attention to his sales pitch as I was actually looking at basketball shoes. As I tried on shoes and such, this guy decided to do a demonstration. He quickly rubbed a streak across my shoe and then proudly declared, “Look at the difference. And you’ll hardly have to use much at all.” He looked up at me and found me glaring daggers at him as I said, “I like my shoes scratched up.” He hastily gathered his bottle and cloth, and as he stood up he said, “Oh, it’ll come right off. Don’t worry about that.” Luckily he was not telling the truth as he was pitching his product to us and it did come right off within a couple of days.
What!! Someone selling something not telling 100% truth? Spinning the facts? How can such a thing be? Guys like him are the reason why I really enjoy salesmen who do their *real* job, which is to help me figure out what I need to meet *my* needs. I think all my salesmen friends are those kind of guys.