[Setting: Sporting goods retailer that also buys used goods from customer. The lighting is poor. Floor: cluttered with crunchy batting gloves, rusty dumbbells and a variety of other decade-old sports junk some 11-year-old never wanted anyway.
Scene: Employee (mid-20s, lanky, listless and coffee high-wired) is quoting customer (early-50s, tall, thickly mustached, fanny-packed, Italian or some other type of volatile) for used equipment. Customer's son (less than 10, bushy-haired, most definitely snot-nosed) doing his best Tasmanian devil impression in the background.]
“OK, sir, I’m all set. I can cut you a check for $18 for the lot of it, or — if you prefer — I can get you a trade value of $22. That way, all this stuff is out of your closet and a few extra bucks stay in your wallet.” Something clangs in the background. It sounds expensive.
Brows should not furrow in such a manner. Not for less than $25. This was a brutal, never-before-seen furrowing usually reserved for firings, break-ups or life-altering decisions. The man’s mustache climbs upward as he obnoxiously clears his throat and crosses his arms. He’s watched a lot of one-hour network dramas. He knows how to be mad.
“Are you kidding?” Another background crash and clang. The employee can see a piece of slat wall dangling unnaturally.
“Do you know how much I paid for this stuff? This hockey stick was like 80 dollars. This baseball glove? Easily 40 bucks. And this is the same racquet Borg used to win the French in 1979. And you’re telling me you can give me $22?”
The ball glove is shit. The leather is cracking, and the inside is nauseatingly damp. The blade of the 80-dollar hockey stick is worn to an eye-gouging width, and is probably now better suited to slay vampires than handle a puck. And most importantly, the Borg racquet — the Borg racquet!— is made of 30-year-old wood. It’s only place is the wall of a tennis enthusiast’s man cave.
“Actually, the $22 would be on store credit. The check value is $18.” The employee is familiar with both client interaction and the English language. Yet this waste of breath is what escapes his mouth first. His pale, semi-freckled cheeks flush in preparation. Three aluminum baseball bats crash to the ground, ringing. The little bastard picks his nose and keeps running.
“Eighteen dollars?” shouts the mustache. His hands gesture with dramatic, unnecessary vigor, like he’s arguing a yellow card. “Eighteen dollars for a tennis racquet that won the goddamn French Open? Do you have any idea what you’re talking about”
The mustache is shouting. Customers are staring. The employee feels his ears heat up. Good times. Nothing like trying to calmly explain yourself with an apple-red face. He talks a little too fast.
“Actually,theamountsIgaveyouwereforthestickandtheglove. Thewoodenracquetdoesn’tcomparetotoday’scompositetechnologyandismoreofacollector’sitemthananything.Itmayhavemorevalueonline, sir.” Whew. His chest is third-time-having-this-conversation-today tight.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, kid. Let me talk to the manager.” Ahh, there it is. Everyone knows that lanky twenty-somethings are never the boss.
“Well, sir, you’re speaking to him.” He tries to say it without a hint of tough-shit sarcasm, but it never quite happens that way. He knows it’ll piss off the customer in that my-suburban-Wednesday-is-ruined kind of way, But let’s face it, there’s not a lamer, more superficial way to be pissed. The employee — err, manager — knows what comes next.
“YOU?” The mustache is paired with the wide eyes of insulted disbelief. “Well you’re not going to be open very long running your business this way, I can tell you that, son. I know for a fact that you’re gonna sell this hockey stick for 50 bucks, this ball glove for 30 and this racquet for at least $20. You’re gonna give me $18 so you can sell it for a hundred bucks. I was born on a Tuesday, son, but that doesn’t mean I was born this Tuesday.” Funny how you become a stranger’s son when he’s in a huffy-puffy mini-rage. Also funny how the racquet — the Borg racquet! — went from a major championship winner to being worth 20 bucks.
Customers are still staring, but now they’re pretending to look at equipment for a sport they’ve never heard of. The damn kid is creeping around the expensive stuff now. There are buttons to be touched, which only leads to good things.
“Sir, I understand where you’re coming from. I’ve been there before. I can assure you that, while we will sell your things for more than 18 or even 22 dollars, we will not mark these items up quite that much. Now, what can I do to make you happy?”
The oldest, laziest,ego-strokingest response the retail world has ever known. It usually works. Like offering a free cocktail to the fat guy who can’t fit in the restaurant booth.
“Can we do an even $25?” What the hell is even about $25? And what happened to the stuff being worth $100? Is this mustached blowhard even listening to himself?
A series of high-pitched mechanical beeps shoot through the air, followed by a whirring noise. The damn kid has turned a perfectly cluttered store into the backseat of 16-year-old girl’s car.
“Tell you what, sir, I’ll write you the check for the trade-in value I gave you, but that’s really all I can offer.” The whirring noise picks up its pace. The employee fights a smirk.
“OK, I really just want to get rid of this stuff. It’s been sitting in my garage for years, so what the hell.” The mustache has calmed. The other customers have happened upon sports equipment they can actually identify. One piece of fireworks remains. The whirring continues to increase.
The employee sribbles a $22 check he never really wanted to write. The whirring noise reaches a deafening noise as the mustache finally decides to glance around for the damn kid.
As the employee scrawls his signature, the damn kid thuds, bounces and shoots off the back of a thousand-dollar treadmill screaming at 11 miles an hour. He scrapes to a halt in the fetal position. His face is a mess of terror, embarrassment and dog-pissed-on-rug-ness. Tears well up.
The employee rips the check from the checkbook and saunters toward the kneeling mustache, who is collecting the his pride and joy from the carpeted concrete floor. He hands the mustache the check and yanks the safety key from the treadmill. The whirring simmers, cools and stops. The headache-inducing pair dust themselves off and let themselves out quietly.
He turns toward front counter and bursts into laughter. Customers are staring again. The next seven hours will fly by.
