Have a nice day, or something

I find my job ethically troubling. I get paid AU$15 an hour to screw people over, trying to sell them things that they're sometimes not entirely sure they want.

It's pretty debatable as to whether the interests of the salesperson and the interests of the customer are mutually incompatible. They are different, that's for sure. The 'salesman ethic' is a character type that is basically defined by behaving in a manner that is unnatural to one's personality. Salesmen have to act unnaturally in the company of others. Why? The answer, at the most fundamental level, is that they've got something to hide. Talking up a product involves highlighting its strong points and playing down its weaknesses. Perhaps, then, the truest salesman is he or she who is most adept at deception.

Conservatives, business trainers and middle to senior management would argue otherwise - mainly through rhetoric, of course. For them, the salesman is merely an aid for the customer, sharing the same values as him or her. They would say that both salesman and customer want to come out of the social interaction with the best product to match the customer's needs.

They work from an underlying assumption: that all customers positively want to buy. To be sure, many of us do; these customers will either actively go out to research and subsequently buy a product, or will first go through a purely internal process of value adaptation where a 'want' is modulated into a 'need'. Other customers, however, remain unsure about their wants, and go to the point of sale because it is the most voluminous source of product information - not the most reliable, just the largest. They ultimately want to learn whether or not they really need the product before making their decision as to the 'necessity' of the purchase.

That being said, due consideration should admittedly be accorded to the fact that the customer approaches the salesperson usually with some sort of awareness, however sharply acknowledged, that the ends of the salesman are geared first and foremost towards encouraging customers to buy. Many customers do understand this; they've been bred into a cynicism regarding the salesman's motives. They've been trained in the art of smart buying.

This encourages a sort of half-life (or to use a smart-ass term, anomie) in the development of sales techniques necessary to maximise profit. As buyers become ever-more shrewd, learning the linguistic tools of the trade, the salesman finds that simply starting the interaction with a once-highly-regarded open-ended question, like 'how can I help you?', becomes supposedly inadequate. As the retail sector expands, and competition flourishes, sales techniques become more aggressive, and more dog-eat-dog.

I find a certain personal experience particularly enlightening here. As a permanent part-timer, I was required to attend a one-day sales training seminar with an assortment of full-time staff and assistant managers. The day was devoted to a step-by step account of the 'appropriate' ways in which a salesperson should conduct him/herself during a transaction. Let me list a few points that best illustrate a charade of friendliness and caring that belies a fundamental motive for deception:

1. The fashionable way of starting a transaction is no longer to get into business talk, but rather to engage in small talk. A highlighted point is that opening lines should have nothing to do with business. Favourable topics of conversation often involve complimenting the customer disingenuously on an article of clothing, an accompanying child, or evidence of other purchases made in the shopping centre.


2. When asking why a certain feature of a product is important to the customer, it is recommendable that the response is followed up not firstly with a different question but with a comment that demonstrates that the salesperson is interested in what the customer has to say.


3. It's also important to overcome deflections at least once. For example, 'I'm just browsing' can be countered with 'that's nice. Just browsing for anything in particular?'


4. When the customer agrees to purchase the product, it is wise to eliminate 'buyer's remorse' by verbalising agreement with the customer's choice, like 'I think you've made a wise choice, Jane'. This will reduce the chance of the customer waking up to the realisation that they don't really want what they've just bought, and subsequently returning it.

Parallels to the salesman ethic are found in other sectors of the workforce, and in other spheres of life. Sociologist Richard Sennett and historian Christopher Lasch both recognised that, in the workforce in general, the salesman ethic has replaced the Calvinist ethic of hard work and discipline as a predominant character trait. Work these days seems to be oriented less and less to personal productivity and self-discipline and more and more about networking and maintaining a glossy self-image that maintains approval from one's peers.

There are people that I would call salesmen that don't necessarily work in retail. Their personalities reflect certain traits that resound with the salesman ethic. They'll tend to treat people as a means to an end or as an adornment in their own lives, rather than as another unique individual with separate wants and needs. For the sake of interaction with almost any other human being, they will feel the need to maintain an image, in behaviour, clothing and physical appearance, that meets a high standard. Expressions of real feeling are equated to a show of weakness. Their relationships with other people tend to be shallow or transient. They'll often be competitive or aggressive, whether this is exhibited in the need to keep up with the Joneses or in wit and humour at the expense of others.

What are the greater implications of the emergence of this kind of character? I guess it means that people find it harder to identify with each other, to form meaningful relationships and to sustain any real sense of community. What can we do? Frankly, I'm stuck for words.

Next time I want to talk about celebrity.