Anyone here work at Hermes or Louis Vuitton?

It does not; she sometimes gets mentioned in shows when they’re aired in English or when the translators didn’t perform a substitution. Starting with Fresh Prince of Bel-Air the trend in Spain has been to substitute, when posible: in any episode of Fresh Prince where Oprah got mentioned, she was turned into María Teresa Campos (who had a very succesful program with a similar format).

In 1997/98 I went into the Tiffany’s in Palo Alto (Stanford shopping center) looking “regular”, i.e,. jeans and tshirt, basically your typical internet start-up gear. Ok, possibly a little more ragged than that, but not homeless or anything :slight_smile: Anyhow, I looked around a bit, got some icy looks, waited for someone to talk to me – the place was basically empty. Nothing. Look around some more, this is right in front of the salespeople… nothing! Finally I made eye contact and the guy asked if he could help me. I said I was kind of interested in rings (I was, engagement rings) and he said something along the lines of “I don’t know if we’ll have anything in your price range”. As if this prick has any idea what I can afford… which was certainly not “anything in the store”, it was probably most of their engagement rings. I walked out, and vowed to never give Tiffany’s a cent after that. And I’ve spent a lot of coin on jewelry since then, so their loss.

When I worked at Radio Shack, I always tried to give great service to the “bummy” looking folks. It definitely paid off; plenty of folks who can’t dress worth a damn have money to spend on a/v equipment etc. I was happy to pick up the commissions for those folks when other salespeople in my store would just ignore them.

Good on the folks upthread who “make them pay” by wasting salesdroids’ time after being abused :slight_smile:

Suggested classic reading: “The £1,000,000 Bank-Note”, by Mark Twain.

Unfortunately in this age of credit cards it’s much harder to perpetrate a similar effect.

And ripopgome’s experience is a good example of why not to ignore the sloppily dressed. It’s definitely true in Silicon Valley (and perhaps true elsewhere as well), that there are plenty of guys in t-shirts and jeans who could afford anything in the Tiffany store.

Take Mark Zuckerberg, for instance. I think he’s in the process of being made over to look more “adult”, but he’s been nine-figures wealthy for a while but still dressed like a broke undergrad. (And he’s actually famous. There are plenty of others in the Bay Area who are anonymous, but have hit it big at one company or another.) As these guys acquire wealth, they’re going to be going from shopping at The Gap to shopping at Wilkes Bashford or another high-end retailer.