Shopped at Brighton

At Brighton Collectibles, as I suppose at most retail shops, they hire people to come in and “shop” the employees. This means people pretend they’re customers and test our selling technique. They latch on to one salesperson and review her efforts. We never know who they are and we only find out at the end of the month how we did. My first six months at Brighton we never got better than an 80% shop. This isn’t bad, but we really wanted the 100%.

One night in October I got a call from the store. Christina, one of the managers, told me that I was the one who got shopped. She sounded very serious and I panicked. I thought she was calling to warn me that I’d done badly so I’d be prepared if I got chewed out. I’m sure Brock was kind of worried about my depressed reaction to the call.

I asked her if it was bad, and she said, “Pretty bad…you got 100%!!!” Much to Brock’s surprise, I fell to my knees laughing. (I don’t think it’s healthy to shock people like that.) I remember hearing Christina laugh as Brock helped me get up, but I couldn’t walk. Before I could say anything, Christina said, “So, guess what we get?”

I was so surprised. “We get something?!”

She said, of course. Each month a diferent prize was offered. This month the prize was our choice between a sterling silver necklace and bracelet. They were special editions, hand-made in Bali. Each was worth $250.00 and we weren’t even selling them to customers yet. Everyone at the store got to choose one or the other (I ended up choosing the bracelet). Once again, I almost fell over. By this time Brock was completely confused and trying very hard to wait for me to tell him what was going on. He escorted me to a bench and was very patient.

When I got off the phone I told Brock all about it. He was as excited as I was. The rest of the night I kept laughing and clapping my hands. The next day at work my boss gave me flowers and everyone hugged each other. It turned out this was the first time our store had won the 100% prize. It was kind of a mile-stone for us and it was great for morale.

I was so pleased and proud to be the first one to get the 100%. Everyone wins when we get it because it reflects on how well we’ve been trained. Since then, we have had one more 100% and it was one of the managers, Theresa. Well done, us!