The WORST watch salesman thread

I had this experience about a month and a half ago when looking for a replacement watch.

I walked into the store and had my eye on a watch. When I tried it on, I mentioned that I could not see the hands of the watch under normal lighting conditions because there was too much going on (it was one of those skeleton watches). The salesman prompted the WORST response I've ever heard. He said, "Watches are just to be a fashion statement anyway. I can't even read my watch, see?" he points to his watch, "Heck, I didn't even know how to read a watch without numbers until I was 40."

Um... I walked out to say the least. I bought a different watch from another salesman the next day


Have any of you had crazy experiences like this?

Wow

Eaaqas said:

I had this experience about a month and a half ago when looking for a replacement watch.

I walked into the store and had my eye on a watch. When I tried it on, I mentioned that I could not see the hands of the watch under normal lighting conditions because there was too much going on (it was one of those skeleton watches). The salesman prompted the WORST response I've ever heard. He said, "Watches are just to be a fashion statement anyway. I can't even read my watch, see?" he points to his watch, "Heck, I didn't even know how to read a watch without numbers until I was 40."

Um... I walked out to say the least. I bought a different watch from another salesman the next day


Have any of you had crazy experiences like this?

Click to expand...

Let me Guess Jarid right?

Ha, no. It was a local place. Just so ridiculous!

I used to be in the business at one of the biggest high-end retailers in the world. The following are actual quotes from salespeople spoken to customers.

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A Korean-American female salesperson who was fluent in Japanese, Chinese and Korean, but not English. Trying to find out if rugged shock resistance was important to particular customer as she was trying to sell him a Rolex:

"Do you bangs a lot?"

She was a top producer.

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Same lady as above, deciding whether to help an Orthodox Jewish/Hasidic customer who just entered the store or to let another salesperon assist him [to her colleague]:

"Do you want to take the Yamaha?" [she meant "Yarmulke."]

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Same lady again, now trying to explain a self-winding [automatic] movement:

"It works on the risky motion."

I think she most of practiced hypnosis on her customers, as she regularly wrote $2 to $3M in sales annually. She was neither friendly nor nice nor outrageously beautiful.



A middle-aged male salesperson, also not as comfortable in English as he was his native language (he was from Turkey, I think), trying to convince a man that his wife had an impeccable eye for beauty as the woman was trying to convince the hubby to spend more than he had budgeted:

"Your wife, she is very tasty." [think Charlie Tuna from the Starkist commercials.]

He was nicknamed Fast Eddie.

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A salesman who suffered from logorrhea (locquaciousness in extremis) and poor judgment. He was trying to sell a $40,000 Vacheron Constantin that we were eager to unload:

"This is on spiff. If you buy this, I get a $2,000 bonus."


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The sales people weren't only ones who said questionable things. A client who went bankrupt because of his acquisition disorder, after buying a $50,000 Patek Philippe perpetual calendar, asked his salesman:

"So, Joe, when I go over the George Washington Bridge (crossing from NY to NJ), how much will the time zone difference be? I need to reset the watch when I do that, right?"

That one is kind of a trick question. Legally, it's the same time -- same zone. Speaking astronomically, the guy actually wasn't totally wrong.

This guy would buy a watch like this; keep it for a week or two; then change his mind. After his first few erratic changes of heart, we stopped taking returns & exchange from him. We made him treat everything as a trade-in -- imagine what happens when you drive a car of the lot at your new car dealer, what with depreciation and all. Same deal here. 20 or 30 watches back and forth for six months. He lost money on every deal. But, it was a disease. He had inherited a business from his late father. He put the company out of business due to this AD behavior.


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A salesman suffering a temporary bout of amnesia or Alzheimers while trying to explain a complicated Breitling chronograph's calendar.

"So, here you have the day, Wednesday. The date, the 22nd. And, here's the year, 1942." [He was only off by about 56 years.]

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Though it was a classy place, I saw customers pull $10,000 in cash out of their socks and hundreds out their brassieres.


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Routinely, customer to salesperson:

Customer: How do you set this?
Sales Person: I don't know. Let's get the watchmaker.

I knew a watchmaker who did a repair on the second most complicated watch -- a grand complication perpetual calendar chrongraph --that IWC offered at the time. The overhaul required a complete disassembly of 600+ parts. When he reassembled it, there were still parts left on his bench.

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Eaaqas, while on its face the salesman's statement was idiotic, you would be surprised at how many people will spend thousands -- even tens of thousands -- with exactly that sentiment.



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We had a billionaire Greek shipping magnate customer who would only buy Omega watches. He owned more than 1,000 of them.


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Al Goldstein, the late publisher of Screw Magazine, would only buy Corum watches. He died broke and had to pawn all the watches.




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Rolex asked me to find and buy for them a rare Rolex Paul Newman Daytona because they couldn't find one on their own. It was a gift to a very famous Formula One driver who at the time happened to be a member of the board of directors of Omega.


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Customers would bring in counterfeit watches to sell or trade. There were the folks who knew what they had and thought they might get one over on someone. Then, there were the folks who really did receive them as gifts and either wanted to see if a loved one had duped them or who really didn't know any better. Sad, those folks. I also sales people and store managers send me obvious fakes that they had unwittingly taken as trade-ins (I ran the vintage division and the trade-in program nationwide). Not good. Worse when they knew better and thought I wouldn't notice. Really, really not good.

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I have been out of that business for a long, long time now. The funny stories still amuse me, but I don't miss the business.

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Customers. They all say, "I'll be back." Most don't come back. They're simply trying to make an escape. In one instance, a comeback asked for his original salesperson. The person greeting the customer, when asked where the first salesperson was, said:

"She doesn't work here anymore." Salesperson #1 was at lunch or in the restroom. That still leaves the customer the opportunity to seek salesperson #1 at another, competing establishment. So, the same malefactor gets more creative the next time she is asked where her colleague is:

"She died."

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D'oh!

Thanks,
Mike

robk said:

...I knew a watchmaker who did a repair on the second most complicated watch -- a grand complication perpetual calendar chrongraph --that IWC offered at the time. The overhaul required a complete disassembly of 600+ parts. When he reassembled it, there were still parts left on his bench...

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So what watch did you get?

robk said:

Customers. They all say, "I'll be back." Most don't come back. They're simply trying to make an escape.

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Are we really that transparent?

(Yeah, we are no doubt.)

Usually, I just give it the nod & "thanks" as I head out the door if the sales staff has been noticeably energetic at acknowledging my existence. Someone who has actually been "helpful" rather than just hovering and/or going through his stale routine would probably get an actual "thanks for your help" that would seem in earnest, and perhaps a "I have to ask my wife ... tell her what I want for Xmas ... you've given me something to think about ..." which might make him think his labour had not been in vain.

Of course, entering a high-high-end watch store, I'd have that "whoa ... I can't even afford the rent on the patch of carpet I'm standing on for the three seconds I'm standing on it" look, and gawk at the spectacles as long as I figured I could get away with it.

Doc4 said:

Are we really that transparent?

(Yeah, we are no doubt.)

Usually, I just give it the nod & "thanks" as I head out the door if the sales staff has been noticeably energetic at acknowledging my existence. Someone who has actually been "helpful" rather than just hovering and/or going through his stale routine would probably get an actual "thanks for your help" that would seem in earnest, and perhaps a "I have to ask my wife ... tell her what I want for Xmas ... you've given me something to think about ..." which might make him think his labour had not been in vain.

Of course, entering a high-high-end watch store, I'd have that "whoa ... I can't even afford the rent on the patch of carpet I'm standing on for the three seconds I'm standing on it" look, and gawk at the spectacles as long as I figured I could get away with it.

Click to expand...

"Let me think about it." - Translation, let me think about it while checking the price in every other shop on the street, and on the internet via my phone.

isi07734 said:

So what watch did you get?

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Ha, I wish I could say, but I'm a poor college kid.. Nothing impressive.

Overcoming objections is probably the hardest part of sales.

I miss USSR. You would walk into a store and ask what watches they have. They would tell you they are all sold out. Maybe in a couple of months. In the next store they would tell you they only have ladies watches and hadn't received men's watches in the past 3 years. Then you would walk into another and they would show you the only 2 watches that are left that even a lumberjack wouldn't put on. Then after a couple of months someone would tell you some store in the nearby town has just received a shipment of some new watches. You would run there ASAP and pay a month worth of salary for a half-decent watch, the only model they have received and run back home all happy.

In America, you wear watch and tell time. In Soviet Russia, time tells you, and you wear out.

Doc4 said:

In America, you wear watch and tell time. In Soviet Russia, time tells you, and you wear out.

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Ahahah...

Toothpick said:

Overcoming objections is probably the hardest part of sales.

Click to expand...

I walked into a BMW store. I was dressed in shorts and TShirt and driving my 1999 Miata.

The guy who was up came over to me and asked what I was interested in. I was interested in the M235i. He said they only had one and the sales manager was driving it.

The he said that I probably wouldn't be that impressed after driving a Miata.

He was right.

Later that month I went to the BMW driving school and drove those and some M4s

For an extra 20-60k I wasn't that impressed.