Date idea: we drive to Petsmart and stare at the fish. We don’t buy anything.
When we are done, we drive to Meijer and stare at the fish. We don’t buy anything.
Then, to end the evening, we drive to Petco and stare at the fish. We don’t buy anything.
Let’s do this again sometime, eh?
For our second date, I will take you to the local speciality aquarium shops to stare at the fish. We won’t buy anything, but if we ask nicely, they might let us feed one.
bold of you to assume i have the willpower not to buy more fish
I know this post is made in fun and enjoyment and it’s funny! Yes!
But for a serious moment, can I ask folks to not go into stores if you plan to buy nothing?
A little known fact is that every single person who walks into the store is counted. When someone walks about without making a purchase, that is considered a failure on the employees to not sell them on anything. So going into a store with the specific intention to buy nothing kinda hurts us, you know?
I know it cam be a chill way to waste time when you need to! I used to do so, especially pet supply stores. But I’m hoping with this knowledge some folks may consider alternate ways to kill time, because people get their hours cut, or even fired, over that number.
I do not shop at pet stores if I do not know that they consistently take good care of the animals they have for sale. I will not go into a pet store planning to buy anything unless I have been there before and things seem clean, healthy, and well cared-for. When I do make purchases, I return to places I have observed to be operating responsibly.
It…kinda sounds like you missed the point entirely Ship
If I didn’t feel like I was able to enter shops and look around without having a moral responsibility to make a purchase, I would never enter a shop in person again in my life and exclusively shop online. I’ve never heard of browsing being directly damaging to employees before – so many shops I know of attempt to lure passerby inside ‘just to look’ with free samples.
I get what you’re saying, but there’s a difference (morally, if not numbers-wise) between going in to look around and then you just end up not buying anything, and going in purposefully to look around without buying anything. Now this kind of depends on the location – a large store with lots of traffic and a high number of sales (something like Wal-Mart), I doubt a few people not buying anything is going to make much difference. And stores where they don’t have actual sales people convincing you to buy stuff may not track customers (reason being that a store with active sales people is paying those people to talk to you and convince you to buy something. If you don’t buy something (even if you don’t actually talk to a sales person), in the company’s eyes a sales person has presumably wasted precious minimum-wagetime making a sub-par sales pitch to you).
I’m sure there are lots of stores that don’t track customers – you can always (discretely) ask an employee if you entering and not buying anything significantly affects them, especially if you’re doing it at the same location frequently (a one-off is no big deal in my opinion)
(Also, the free samples aren’t meant to lure people in “just to look”, they’re meant to lure people in so that they will then buy something)
At an electronics store where I used to work (where we were on commission and expected to meet daily/weekly/monthly quotas) we were told not to use the customer entrance ever if we could avoid it so that we wouldn’t be counted as customers. I vividly remember one day when a bad storm was coming in and my manager was going to hilarious lengths to peek out the door without setting off the sensor so he could see if there were any funnel clouds forming. We had a moderate amount of traffic and very little in the way of sales because of people who wanted to come in and play around with our display items with with no intention of actually buying anything (or even worse, spend half an hour chatting with a sales person getting advice on what to buy… and then promptly going to the Target across the parking lot to get it cheaper). We just happened to be in a bad spot, but management wouldn’t hear it and we were constantly getting shit because our sales-to-customer ratio was so low. I mean, there was a lot of other crap we dealt with from management as well, and honestly the sales-to-customer-ratio was probably like… 5th or 6th down the list of concerns, but it was just one more thing to deal with on a very long list of bullshit.
So yeah. If you’re just kind of wandering around killing time and you’re at least open to the possibility that you might make a purchase if something really catches your eye (even if that purchase takes place some time later, when you can better afford it), that’s totally cool in my opinion. But going into a store with the express intent of looking around and not buy anything, now or in the future, because you don’t want to support the store (as much as I agree with you in your boycott of such pet stores) is not cool, if that store tracks customers, because it hurts the employees more than it hurts the store itself.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand how there is a difference. The point is that going into stores and not buying anything negatively affects the employees, correct? The store does not know my reason for not making a purchase – whether I was “open to the possibility” or not is unknown to them, and relevant only on an internal moral level. It has the same result either way, and isn’t the result (”employee is harmed” vs “employee is not harmed”) what actually matters? The store isn’t going to know that you’ll come back for it in a few months when you can afford it.
I don’t usually go into stores without a plan. I’m almost never “open to the possibility” of buying something – I don’t really have the funds for impulse purchases. My only reason for going into stores is either “I don’t have money to buy something but I enjoy looking at fish and getting out of the house for entertainment that does not cost me money" or “I need to buy this specific thing and this thing only”. Is it better to only do the latter? Or is there some way to find out if a company does this so I can avoid them?
FWIW, I read somewhere that the Talmud specifically prohibits going into a store and not buying anything because you’re stealing the shopkeeper’s time and attention.
(When I read that I was a little tempted to convert.)
Surely that only applies if you’re actively interacting with a shopkeeper? As in, asking questions or letting them offer you things? I avoid shopkeepers unless I actually need them, which is pretty much exclusively when I’m trying to buy something. If the extent of your interaction with an employee is “Can I help you?” “No, thank you!” does that count, morally, as stolen time/attention? I can see how that would be bad if you asked a bunch of questions and then left to go buy the same item at a different store, but it doesn’t seem relevant in a big store where you can wander around without interaction you don’t seek out.
If you were to wait for people to come out and then come in through the “Exit” door so as not to be counted, and then didn’t interact with any employees at all, how would that harm anyone at all?
“going into a shop and not buying things is morally impure” is the most tumblr fucking thing i’ve ever heard. fucking hell.
It’s called ‘conversion’ and every single person that enters a store without buying something, whether you talk to a staff member or not, effects the conversion rate and endangers the job security of the people working in the store.
This is a real aspect of working in retail and don’t act like it’s just some sort of wishy-washy tumblr moralizing.
That has been established – what I want to know now is whether there are ways around it. How difficult is it to bypass conversion counters? Is it possible to call ahead to stores you are thinking about shopping at to ask if they use these metrics? I would rather not patronize businesses that do this at all because I find it morally repugnant.
However, I’m not sure that I agree that each individual is morally obligated to make a purchase every time they enter a store. I enjoy browsing even when I cannot afford to make a purchase, and many people enter stores to view items they will save up for and purchase at a later date. Some people enter stores with companions even when only one of them intends to make a purchase. If this is harmful behavior, can it not be neutralized by crouching down, leaping over pressure sensors, or entering through exit doors to avoid being counted, rather than enabling a fucked up practice?
The retail workers commenting seem more like they’re pretty respectfully requesting that you not do a specific thing that gets them in trouble, and you’re trying to find every nitpicky, ludicrous way (leaping over the pressure sensors? Really?) to take the blame off yourself so you can still do the thing without feeling guilty, but the reality is that by interacting in any way with a corporate chain store, there’s a decent chance that you’re supporting a managerial structure that does this or something like this – even if you’re not giving them any money. And no, you probably can’t just call and ask, because retail workers aren’t exactly encouraged to be that honest about their work environments (I have gotten in trouble for being too honest more than once), and management will probably straight-up lie to you. Welcome to Late Stage Capitalism: you cannot fully extract yourself from it unless you go live in a yurt in Wyoming or something.
You’re not in any way “morally obligated” to make a purchase every time you enter the store, and no one here was really trying to tell you that you are (except maybe the person with the Talmud? But I’m not gonna weigh in on that one as I’m not Jewish). And sure, fine, go stare at the fish if you need something to do once in a while – you’re not going to drastically affect the issue if it’s an occasional thing. Just please, for the sake of our sanity, it would be greatly appreciated if the general populace could avoid regularly popping into stores with the deliberate intention of not buying shit, because the whole point is that management *doesn’t* know that, so then they yell at us because it looks like we’re not doing our jobs, when in reality we never had a chance to in the first place. Which we as employees are actually often well aware of, but brick-and-mortar retail is built on concepts developed on a completely different timeline that ignores the reality of consumers and then blames its employees for not being good enough.
Also, I think the “most tumblr” thing about this issue is that it needed to be blown out of proportion and taken to its moral extreme when in reality, all the original retail commentor was probably trying to say was “can u do this thing less,” not “never ever do this thing ever at risk of death to the laboring class.”
I don’t understand how asking if there are simple ways to avoid causing damage is nitpicky or unreasonable of me. I wish to avoid harm, yes, but if it is possible to both avoid harm and continue enjoyable activities, that seems… good?
If it seems like I am blowing this out of proportion when I should just accept that it’s a bad habit and move on, it’s because visiting in-store aquariums has been my primary day-off leisure activity for months. I do not have many affordable opportunities to get out of the house, but if activities I enjoy cause direct harm, I cannot enjoy them, period – the anxiety and guilt will far outstrip any pleasure I might derive from staring at fish or browsing clothing I cannot afford. I am only trying to establish whether there are ways to minimize unnecessary harm by exploiting loopholes – if there are individual actions I can take to avoid jeopardizing someone’s employment or not. This practice is not something I knew about and now that I do it is going to completely change how I interact with brick and mortar stores. If both X and Y lead to Z, I don’t see a point distinguishing between them; the guilt will be the same either way.
If management is punishing workers for not making sales, that’s not the fault of customers, it’s the fault of management.
Don’t let the fuckers escape the blame they rightly deserve.
If you work for a store or chain that engages in this kind of coinversion metrics bullshit, and you can’t get management to stop being shitty because you don’t have union backing, then the next step is to get public support. Rather than blaming people for coming to your store, tell them (anonymously, online, if that’s safer) which stores are pulling this shit.
Ship’s platform is ridiculously huge and I am willing to bet that if you told them, “hey, don’t go to [chain store], they do conversion metrics,” not only would Ship stop going, they would tell other people to stop going, and at least some of those other people (like me) have nothing better to do at work all day than get on the phone and raise hell with corporate offices for being fucking assholes.
But if I don’t know what corporate offices to call, or what chains to avoid, then I can’t do shit to help anyone, and neither can the rest of us.
Older forms of English kept Latin’s gender-specific suffixes -tor and -trix; tor is for men and trix is for women. So a male pilot is an aviator, a female pilot is an aviatrix. A male fighter is a gladiator, a female fighter is a gladiatrix.
This contrasts with the modern system, where tor is for both men and women, and trix are for kids.
Sure, relationships typically start with a honeymoon phase that then grows into something deeper but a bit more mellow if things work out, but it’s depressing as fuck that this has turned into a really, really common script for straight relationships that says it’s totally normal and inevitable for dudes to just become more and more emotionally checked out of the relationship, and leave it to their girlfriend/wife to perform if she wants to get even a crumb of affection from him. I’m so fucking tired of seeing women constantly being taught that decades of emotional neglect is just our lot in life.
Don’t let people make fun of you for liking japanese culture.
I am living in japan right now and let me tell ya:
There are people here who can’t speak or understand English who play nothing but Missy elliot and ludacris, even in businesses like housing offices and restaurants.
There are people who have cowboy hats and dead cow skulls in their home because they idolize what they assume American homes are like.
There are people who learn English strictly through music videos and American television shows.
There are entire karaoke bars with english songs often sung by people who have no idea what the lyrics mean.
Japan often takes American shows like the powerpuff girls and make japanese versions of them.
They often mistake common Americans for celebrities. I have been mistaken for Micheal jordan, tiger woods, Shaquille o’neal, Tyler perry, and saddest of all: queen latifa.
The act of sprinkling English into your japanese sentences is considered cute and cool and is popular with teenagers. Bonus points if you happen to use it correctly.
Japanese stores sell shirts with english on them and people buy them not knowing that most of those word combinations are nonsense.
Don’t let someone shame you for singing an anime opening, using japanese in your sentences, wearing clothing with japanese on it, ect. If anything, this is just one more thing that you have in common with them.
The American/Japanese cultural exchange is so pure and wonderful and I love it so much
OK BUT RESONATE WITH THE SHIRT THING THOUGH
My Chinese relatives buy me shirts from China with English letters on them hoping I think it’s cool
I have a shirt that says “Hi Quality Uality”
It’s amazing
It happens alot.
And then what’s really great is Americans getting tattoos of Chinese characters thinking they mean one thing when they really don’t
Also a topic where the reverse happens.
lemme tell you..i have been in a grocery store in Japan and heard the unedited Get Low playin over the intercom..it was literally a Katt Williams moment
Oh, unsensored songs are pretty common.
I should not be hearing an unsensored ‘Magic Stick’ playing at a family restaurant.
And the best thing is when literally no one shows that they understand what is being said.
I was in a Chinese cafe one time and they had obviously put on their “fuck you” playlist. I mean, uncensored versions of Fuck You by Lilly Allen, Fuck You by Cee-lo Green, etc. No one else had any idea.
Oh, also, I got my favorite shirt ever in a little tchotchky store in Sichuan:
More
that last one got me holy shit.
i wish i had
never met you
TOUCH MY BUTT
then there would be mo need to imprese you
o need to want you.No naed for. loring you
No need tar crying over you.Noneed for
heartbreaks.No nead for paln oru tears.No
neard for forgoure promises .nead for
For every american teenager that is screaming the lyrics to their favorite anime opening, there’s likely at least 1 or 2 Japanese teens singing English profanities at a karaoke bar.
In my experience rich people don’t tip for shit like they’ll have a $75 bill and tip the waitress $2. Poor people though? They’ll have a $20 bill and tip $8.
One last hot take and then I’ll shut up: the reason adhd is framed first and foremost as a learning disability when it is in fact more apt to call it an emotional processing disorder is bc our society is only concerned w the ways neurological disorders impede a person’s ability to “function” aka get a job and contribute positively to capitalist society. How adhd affects interpersonal behaviors and emotional health is only relevant insofar as it relates to a person’s level of societal functioning PERIOD. There is no interest in improving our actual livelihoods
This becomes especially clear when one examines the effects of the medication they put us on. It is designed to increase our docile productivity at the detriment of pretty much everything else ranging from the mental to the physical (loss of appetite, sleep deprivation and a motley of other basic stuff becomes insufferable)
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