Thursday, June 24, 2010

The Great Indian Bargain

Two reasons why the Indian sales department will never do well enough...
1> the 'take-it-or-leave-it' attitude...
2> creating special offers that never encourages a customer to come back...

Something that has always ('always' not as in throughout my life… hmmm… but yeah… somewhat close to that…) left me wondering is whether the Indian salesmen are the best, or the worst, in the world… now, salesman could be anybody… the guy at the car sales showroom… the guy serving you chicken at KFC (grrrr…)… or even the milkman who leaves a pack of milk outside your doorstep everyday (in India!)… they know it… we don’t… all Indian customers are stupid… no matter how much they manage to bargain and how much they know about the product… sales outlets come up with offers like ‘Buy 2 Get 1 Free’ or ‘Win a Trip to (blah blah)’ or ‘50% off’ and the customer gets easily suckered in… the offers look very attractive and decent on the outside… but a deeper look into it would reveal the cheap and dark side of the ‘offer’… think about it… you shop for 5000 bucks’ worth and then ask about the free trip to Sri Lanka, they tell you the offer is valid only on Tuesdays… you get into an Adidas showroom which offers you a 50% discount, but you can’t find a single item which comes with a 50% discount simply because they are short on stock of items which actually have the discount on them… the fault lies with the Indian customer… the ‘we-came-all-the-way-now-we-gotta-buy-something’ attitude… unless we learn to walk out of the store, if we don’t find what we’re looking for, things are never going to improve…

Bet you’re wondering why the utterly senseless post, out of the blue (??)!!! (not that all my other posts made much sense, but still…)… yep!... I got punk’d too!... as recently as yesterday… I was having a dull day (certainly not the first instance)… and was a little under the weather… weirdly, I felt having some chicken might make me feel better… and off I went to ChicKing… one of the many local equivalents of KFC… since I’d got an e-mail about the ‘offer’ two days back, I was very sure about what I wanted to buy… it was the ‘FIFA offer’ (FIFA offer… like duh!... in a country whose football team has never even qualified for the qualifiers!! (or have they??)… and that too in a state from where a certain ‘mentally challenged’ cricketer is the only person to make it to an international sports arena!)… you buy two wraps and you get two mini-burgers free… (perhaps I missed the ‘oh-here’s-another-FIFA-offer-dumass’ smirk on the face of the guy at the reception)… it was only when I reached home and opened my package that I realized the horrors of horrors!... the wrap was barely thicker than my middle finger… the burger was worse… at a distance of about 15cm, the brown-colored fillet seemed non-existent, and the brown color that I saw here and there made me think it was because the lettuce was wilting!!... sigh… yet another stupid Indian customer… sometimes I do think that Russell Peters was perhaps right (though I still maintain that he’s a ree-tarrrd) when he called Indians ‘Cheap Stinkin’ Bastards’…..

PS: for those who missed it, I've uploaded the Munnar video in the previous blog... since both Chowder and me have the reputation of not having a 'crystal-clear' speech, I've added subtitles as well!!!... how caring of me!!...

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