Arrival of shop snobbery
Snobbery, the obnoxious/pungent variety at that, has finally arrived on Delhi’s horizon.
The DLF Emporio, which sits pretty on a gentle mound touching the road link from VK to Vasant Vihar, is all about big global brands, high society shopping, but, sorry to say, very very low brand of service.
As brand conscious malls go, DLF is not the first one, though it is perhaps the first foreign brand amalgamation in town. From Fendi to Jimmy Choo to Dior to Cartier to Louis Vuitton and to Todd’s to Giovanni — they are all there, one after the other.
And then there is the Ministry of Fashion which is much smaller in both status and size than the other showrooms peeking out of the teak and marble alleys of this seven-star promenade.
The girl attending to customers at the MoF was a pretty young thing. And as some pretty young things go, she was brash, totally untrained in customer care and so rude in a polite kind of way that you could have rushed her to a finishing school at your own expense!
The conversation, to which i was inadvertantly privy, went something like this:
Customer: How much do these pink sandles cost?
Rude salesgirl: These are flat Rs 9,000 and that’s the lowest they will ever get! (Then she walked away, as if the customer did’nt exist.)
The customer, staggered by this strangely aggressive, putdown answer to her simple query did not react though she did promise never to go back to the Ministry of Fashion — not because she could not afford it, but because for her it would be totally de-class to shop at a place where even salesgirls do not know how to perform.
The Ministry of Fashion has been on a sale period for pretty long, wooing customers through SMS’, emails, print adverts and the radio jingles. Obviously, its sales have not been up to the mark and one now knows why. I am now sure, it is the ill-mannered salesgirl at the store, at least in DLF Emporio.
Shop snobbery is not new. It was immortalised in Pretty Woman when a salesgirl at a high-profile showroom ticked off Julia Roberts because she was not appropriately dressed.
In real life, this has taken more sinister hue. The Harrods at London, for example, does not allow shoppers to enter the store in casuals. You have to be dressed formally. Denims are out and so are slippers. Imagine men shopping in a tuxedo and women in evening gowns! Besides being ridiculous it is also inconvenient.
But for a section of the pseudo shoppers, this is class, real class! So they dress up in their best and then go to buy, say a vest, from Harrods! Had I been a silver-spoonian I would not have rushed to Harrods. I would have rather sent my liveried chauffeur to pick up things with a list!
Returning to Miss Rude at MoF: She was slim, fair and in her 20s which meant she was probably a student on a summer job, taken up to fund her partying with friends. She wore a typically Sarojini Nagar chiffon top and black slacks, most probably from GK’s M-block bylanes.
But she had attitude that would keep all polite and even genuine customers at bay. The lady who this PYT had so unnecessarily snubbed, was someone who could afford to send this salesgirl to a behaviour rectification institution, which go by the chic name of “grooming schools” in India.
It was to this lady’s credit that she neither retorted nor put this salesgirl in her place. “She is only a salesgirl after all. You can’t expect her to have any grooming,” she said to her companion before walking out of this classy yet so unclassy place — never to come back.
Meanwhile, one hears that the DLF Emporio’s plan to put in a Rs 1500 entry fees for the mall has been axed with opinions that there is no shopping extravaganza without the great Indian middle class — even in places like these ones.
The DLF Emporio, which sits pretty on a gentle mound touching the road link from VK to Vasant Vihar, is all about big global brands, high society shopping, but, sorry to say, very very low brand of service.
As brand conscious malls go, DLF is not the first one, though it is perhaps the first foreign brand amalgamation in town. From Fendi to Jimmy Choo to Dior to Cartier to Louis Vuitton and to Todd’s to Giovanni — they are all there, one after the other.
And then there is the Ministry of Fashion which is much smaller in both status and size than the other showrooms peeking out of the teak and marble alleys of this seven-star promenade.
The girl attending to customers at the MoF was a pretty young thing. And as some pretty young things go, she was brash, totally untrained in customer care and so rude in a polite kind of way that you could have rushed her to a finishing school at your own expense!
The conversation, to which i was inadvertantly privy, went something like this:
Customer: How much do these pink sandles cost?
Rude salesgirl: These are flat Rs 9,000 and that’s the lowest they will ever get! (Then she walked away, as if the customer did’nt exist.)
The customer, staggered by this strangely aggressive, putdown answer to her simple query did not react though she did promise never to go back to the Ministry of Fashion — not because she could not afford it, but because for her it would be totally de-class to shop at a place where even salesgirls do not know how to perform.
The Ministry of Fashion has been on a sale period for pretty long, wooing customers through SMS’, emails, print adverts and the radio jingles. Obviously, its sales have not been up to the mark and one now knows why. I am now sure, it is the ill-mannered salesgirl at the store, at least in DLF Emporio.
Shop snobbery is not new. It was immortalised in Pretty Woman when a salesgirl at a high-profile showroom ticked off Julia Roberts because she was not appropriately dressed.
In real life, this has taken more sinister hue. The Harrods at London, for example, does not allow shoppers to enter the store in casuals. You have to be dressed formally. Denims are out and so are slippers. Imagine men shopping in a tuxedo and women in evening gowns! Besides being ridiculous it is also inconvenient.
But for a section of the pseudo shoppers, this is class, real class! So they dress up in their best and then go to buy, say a vest, from Harrods! Had I been a silver-spoonian I would not have rushed to Harrods. I would have rather sent my liveried chauffeur to pick up things with a list!
Returning to Miss Rude at MoF: She was slim, fair and in her 20s which meant she was probably a student on a summer job, taken up to fund her partying with friends. She wore a typically Sarojini Nagar chiffon top and black slacks, most probably from GK’s M-block bylanes.
But she had attitude that would keep all polite and even genuine customers at bay. The lady who this PYT had so unnecessarily snubbed, was someone who could afford to send this salesgirl to a behaviour rectification institution, which go by the chic name of “grooming schools” in India.
It was to this lady’s credit that she neither retorted nor put this salesgirl in her place. “She is only a salesgirl after all. You can’t expect her to have any grooming,” she said to her companion before walking out of this classy yet so unclassy place — never to come back.
Meanwhile, one hears that the DLF Emporio’s plan to put in a Rs 1500 entry fees for the mall has been axed with opinions that there is no shopping extravaganza without the great Indian middle class — even in places like these ones.
Published August 2, 2009, Sunday Pioneer, http://www.dailypioneer.com/193033/Arrival-of-shop-snobbery.html
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