I walked back from the doctor just now, a routine medical visit in a country that hardly allows medical visits, routine or otherwise, and I stopped into Ottomanelli's. Otto's is a butcher shop of a bygone-style. They have sawdust on the floor and real trained butchers who will cut a steak to order and give you some tips on cooking it. Since I've lived across from the shop for a full quarter-century, they even call me by name and exchange pleasantries with my skirt steaks.
It's amazing how much the biggest cities can be like small towns where, in the parlance of the old TV sitcom Cheers, "everybody knows your name," and I think there's an advertising lesson in there.
There was an older woman in the shop--by older I mean she was probably ten years younger than I--and she was going over her shopping list with Nick, the head butcher, er, not the head-butcher.
"You don't have red beans, do you? My friend wants red beans and rice. I don't have my glasses. Did I get everything else?" They went over her shopping list like the burglars in Jules Dassin's Rififi going over the plans to the jewelry shop's alarm system.
All at once, I flashed back to my sole experience as a retail employee. In the summer of 1978, just twelve years removed from Chicago's horrible long hot summer riots, I was a night clerk at a liquor store on Rush Street in a seamy section of downtown with parking lots and restaurants on one side of the shop and buy-a-bottle, get-a-girl bars on the other.
I was just 20 at the time and not yet of legal drinking age. But my older brother's social security number was just one off of mine, so I used his card and tax ID and secured a job using the very Georgian-line, "my name is Fred, but my friends call me George."
In terms of the boss' interrogation, I wasn't exactly dealing with Columbo, and the Bragno brothers, who still worked in the shop, hired me for the 4PM to midnight shift on the spot.
The job was a good one, at least to my not-so-wizened eyes. I enjoyed the people I worked with. I enjoyed chit-chatting with customers. And I enjoyed the tidal nature of a business where there are plenty of regulars.
You got to see many of the same people every day--they needed their daily Smirnoff, or their pint of Courvoisier or just a six-pack or a pack of cigarettes. In addition to being paid $3.50/hour with six guaranteed hours at time-and-a-half, I also got to meet some celebrities.
I shook Minnie Minoso's World Series-ringed hand when he came in as a rep for Old Style beer. And I carried a case of expensive red wine to Claudette Colbert's limo. Though one of the Bragnos waited on her, she shook my hand as I placed the case in the trunk. I immediately thought of her in DeMille's Cleopatra, being presented to Caesar as she rolled out of a fine Persian carpet.
I bring all this nostalgia up because I think the ebbs and flows of working in retail are a lot like working in an agency. You have to have your head up and assess every customer or client. You have to be on your toes. You have to look for signs. That's how you serve people better and do better work.
As I said, there were the men and women who came in every day around 5:30. Their offices had just closed and they were on their way home and wanted a bottle. These people wanted good service, a smile, maybe a little small talk, a little reassurance. They were never going to buy a lot. They were never going to break from their routine. But they were good, solid customers and you had to treat them as such.
There are agency clients like that, too. They just want banner ads. Or help with a deck, or something incidental. They're never going to set the world on fire, or let you show them what you can do. But that doesn't mean they're not important to business. So you have to be important to them.
There were also the concave-thin Black parking lot attendants who would buy pints or half pints of the most expensive liquors we had in the joint. The back pocket bottles were easy-to-steal, so they were kept behind the counter, and the parking lot guys liked a little kibbitz with their brandy. There are clients like that, too. You don't get rich off them. But they have a need. They're good people who need a little upping to allay life's downings and you try to help when you can.
Occasionally, I'd get out from behind the counter and wait on someone who was buying wine or liquor but who didn't know anything about wine or liquor. At the age of 20, I didn't know much either, but I had learned from the Bragno brothers good choices at almost every price level for almost every type of alcohol. I could make a recommendation without revealing my inherent ignorance.
Today these people remind me of agency clients as well. They don't know what they want and you have to deliver expertise, whether you have it or not. Though you could upsell the shit out of them, that doesn't really make sense. Even before consultancies like Bain began pontificating on how much more valuable a repeat customer is than an acquired client, if you work in a liquor store, you already knew that.
There were a trillion customers and a trillion customer types. Some were nasty. Some were nice. Some were shoplifting. Some were furtive and underage. Some were just looking for something to do and maybe someone to jawbone with for a while. Some came in like they were on a commando raid. They got the goods, paid and were out in two shakes of a delirium tremens.
You learned pretty quickly, even as the night-cashier, to treat everyone who walked in the store as important. They're people, after all.
I remember once, Bragno's had run an ad in the local paper that showed a quart of Tanqueray gin on sale at a price that was lower than the fifth. (A quart is 32 ounces; a fifth is 25.4 ounces.) A customer hadn't seen the ad and so was buying a fifth.
I said to him, "Excuse me, sir, the quart is the same price and you get 32 ounces of gin. 20-percent more than a fifth for the same price."
One of the Mr. Bragnos heard me and later on, he chewed me out for giving a customer a bargain and losing the store two or three dollars.
I suppose that's like advertising today, too.
You get yelled at for going over scope to do a good job because the agency didn't make as much as they might have. You were supposed to play things by the book and turn in something mediocre. I could never do that. Most people can't.
Just give a little more than you have to.
I still think that's good business.
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