#439 Foreign Hand

To me one of the coolest things about visiting foreign countries is seeing how they go about the ordinary business of commerce—specifically sales. In the United States, we have for the most part refined sales to a fairly genteel art. But no-call lists and telemarketers aside, the most difficult part of the sales process is the opening. People who work in retail outlets do a smaller version of the opening. When you work retail, be it clothing or cars, you get the privilege of having the client come to you. If Joe Blow walks into a men’s store, even though he says he’s just browsing, he has at least made the initial buying decision to walk through the door. After that, the salesman just has to persuade him to stay long enough to advance the buying process to the next level—which product, not if-the-product-at-all. In Mexico, they do the “opening” 24/8—every second of every minute of every hour of every day and twice on Sundays. Hey Sir, I got something to show you. Hey Sir, what are you doing to today? Would you like to take a trip? Hey Sir, I have a free coupon for breakfast. Etc. The free coupon gambit seems to work pretty well. Imagine a particularly aggressive telemarketer combined with Valpak. It starts the minute you hit the airport. You land on your plane. You walk across the tarmac to your terminal. After you get through customs, you’re struggling with repacking your suitcase, and being pushed from behind by the crowd, and you stagger into this area of what looks like official booths and desks. It’s a big room and you see other tourists at other booths. A guy with an official-looking nametag dangling from his neck bounces up and in a thick accent asks where you are staying. More customs? You tell him the name of your hotel and he says come this way. You follow him and he starts to tell you about the free ride he can give you to town and some free coupons for fishing trips and tequila and breakfast and starts to tell you how next time you can stay at his resort which is—and on and on. Suddenly you realize this is one of those timeshare people the pilot warned you about, in the group of timeshare folks you are supposed to ignore and run through. You were expecting a gauntlet of salespeople, standing in opposing lines, getting ready to paddle you with flashy brochures. No, they have a room of their own and the whole airport seems to be designed specifically for selling timeshares to resorts in Mexico. And you, the tired and beleaguered tourist, find that the first task at hand, your first cross-cultural challenge in this warm and foreign place, is to negotiate a maze of aggressive, primitive, and raw salespeople who are throwing out more opening hooks than a fleet of longline fishing boats. Finally you get out of the building. Only to be greeted by a herd of shouting taxi drivers. Loudly encouraging you to pick one of them. Ready to take you for a ride.
America, ya gotta love it.