The Little World

Walter, if you’re anything like me, you enjoy going to the shops.

Sometimes it may seem a little boring to go to department stores with your Mum to buy things like drapes or towels ( and in the 50’s all department stores were painted beige and they were deserts of boredom…) but if you endure the shoe department and the kitchenwares patiently, you can sometimes take a detour through the toys.

And that is what old kids like me do as well. When we have to go pay our bills at the post office and then go and get tea towels at the manchester shop and pills at the chemist…we get a little fatigued. It’s dangerous to go sit in a coffee shop and eat doughnuts because you get too fat and if you go sit in the bar you get too drunk…but you can go shopping in the toy department safely. The only thing you need to do is leave your credit card at home or you run the risk of coming back with another plastic model bomber to build. Tut tut…

Shops that are too hard to get to lose out on our money. There’s a few here in Perth who are situated in outer suburbs that mean you pass through heavy traffic. Imagine going from one side of Singapore Island to the other…and back again in a constant traffic jam for a 10ml pot of paint…Not surprising that I mostly shop at my local hobby store – it’s only 5 km from my house. And they have a big parking lot there too, so I never have to try to circle a city block looking for parking.

Shops that never change can be discouraging after you visit them a few times. Nothing ever seems new and pretty soon you don’t bother going back. But likewise shops that change themselves ALL THE TIME are just as much a pain. Our local grocery store is like that – they spend big money shifting the aisles around and moving goods from one shelf to another. This causes you to get confused when you go in for just one item…you go to where it always is, and it isn’t there anymore. The trick the retailer is playing is to make you go searching all over the shop for the thing you actually need but passing all the tempting foods and offers you don’t need. They make a lot more money on the temptations than they do on the bread and milk sales.

I admire our local hobby shop: Hobbytech. They have aisles set out for specific things and do not vary their position in the store. If I need paint I can go directly to the paint aisle…and even better – they keep the same brands of paint in the same positions in the aisle. If I’m focused on one thing, that focus is rewarded. Take it from me, I am never so focused that I do not look at other things on the aisle anyway, and they get more sales from that.

One more thing – sometimes I go to a shop not knowing what I want to buy there – perhaps not knowing if I want to buy anything at all – I just go to see what they sell and then think about it. I appreciate a salesperson asking if they can help me at the start and I’ll freely confess my wandering visit. If they then let me alone, I frequently do take an interest in the goods and buy something. But if they keep hovering like a suspicious helicopter and if other sales people keep coming up and pressing me to buy, they end up pressing me like toothpaste in a tube – and I squeeze out the front door.

Sometimes I don’t even put the cap back on.