Today I needed to get a new shirt so I went to the local mall. It is a pretty normal mall, with an Auntie Annie’s and a Build-a-Bear and all of those standard mall-type stores. On my way to find a shirt I passed by one of those kiosks where the employees grab you and force product samples on you and, sure enough, a guy steps in front of me and asks me if I want a sample of the lotion they sell. I wanted to be nice since I’ve done the retail thing before so I said I’d take the sample and that is when he pounced.
I’ve seen a lot of sales techniques before but never anything like this. As a woman I’m used to people trying to sell me stuff to make me feel powerful, sexy, or confident. I’m used to products designed to make me feel like if only I bought this product I would be thin, my house would be clean, and my kid would be well behaved. But this was…different. This sales guy was a very attractive young man who was probably 24 or 25 with a delicious foreign accent and he was* into* me. Not actually into me, of course. I have no delusions that this young man would have looked at me twice if he didn’t want me to buy something but he was very convincing. Gently rubbing lotion into my wrist with slow, circular motions. Gazing longingly into my eyes as he explained how amazing this would be for my already perfect skin. Holding my hands in his to compare my wrists so I could see the intense difference this lotion would make for my complexion. This guy might have wanted me to buy a bottle of lotion but he was selling me the idea that he totally wanted to bone me.
I didn’t buy the lotion since I don’t want or need it and it honestly didn’t seem any different than the $2 bottle of lotion I already have in my bathroom but I left the kiosk thinking about men. This is what men deal with all the time. A large percentage of women who work in the service industry are stuffed into low cut, tight fitting clothes and/or instructed to flirt with male patrons to make a sale or earn tips. Go to this bar because the waitresses wear short shorts and tank tops! Watch this football team because the cheerleaders wear midriffs and spandex shorts! That woman at the bank really thinks you’re special, that is why she winks at you and compliments your shirt! Not everything geared towards men is like that but it is a much more common sales technique when selling to men than to women. I cannot imagine how different my self image would be if a third of everything I bought was sold to me with a side of fake sexual interest.
Men, does it bother you that so much of what is marketed toward you is basically marketed toward your penis? Women, does it bother you that almost nothing people try to sell us is aimed at making you feel desired?
There are guys selling flat irons at the mall I go to who do the same thing. They sit you down and basically play with your hair for five minutes. I enjoyed it too much the first time to let them do it again.
Was he Israeli by any chance? One of the local malls had this stand selling assorted lotions and spa products from Israel. I got a very strange & intense hard sell from the guy running it. He was telling me all about the product while looking directly into my eyes as he was demonstrating on my right hand. It felty exactly like he was flirting with me (despite him saying he was straight a couple time & his girlfriend uses it). :smack: He was really cute too (probably fresh out of the army). I ended up buying my mother an entire set for Valentine’s Day.
That’s weird, why do they always have foreign accents? I haven’t ever let them stop me so I don’t know what kind of “massage” I’d get.
So sorry to derail your intention of this thread, which I think is very interesting. But I kinda want to know, is it a whole thing with one country or what?
This exact thing happened to me. Some kind of Dead Sea cleanser and moisturizer. Are we all going yo the same mall? I’m now pissed that I didn’t get the hard sell from a hot woman.
I think the Dead Sea cosmetics kiosks are pretty standard everywhere, which must mean their approach is successful.
If I am not in the mood to be bothered, when they get to the question about whether or not I have heard of the Dead Sea, I say, “Oh yes! It’s basically a sewage container at the end of the Kidron.” That seems to take the panache off their pitch for the health benefits of Dead Sea Salts.
I got the hard sell from a hot woman selling some dead sea stuff at a mall in AUS. Same technique. Rubbing some stuff into my hand while holding my hand right in front of her low cut top, so I either looked at her and she was staring straight into the eyes and smiling, or looked at what she was doing with a great set of tits right there in the background.
Sex sells. I beg for money all the time. I wear a low cut vest, leather push up bra and hold my begging jar between my boobs. I usually get bills stuffed into my vest instead of the jar, but that’s just how it rolls when I’m begging for money at a biker event.
After I’ve gotten every thing I can out of the men, I gesture at the very buffed Marine who is following me and tell the women that if they give me enough money, he will take his shirt off. After he’s taken his shirt off and flexed, I tell them that if they give me more money, the Marine will do push ups. That’s when the women start grabbing wallets out of their men’s back pockets.
My shimmies and wiggles and my Marine doing push ups doesn’t mean that we are into the people we are getting money out of, we are just using what we have.
Actually it kinda does a little, but then compared to the evil that advertising itself is, I think I can live with having to watch shaking boobies and shapely butts once in a while.
Men are just naive waifs wandering about the world, wide-eyed and innocent and all these con artists and salespeople try to take advantage of it. Here is an anecdote with a typical show of abuse.
It is everywhere. And you know what makes us men feel real bad about all this appeal to our innocent masculine sexuality for the almighty dollar? When our girlfriend catches us looking at the billboard and starts giving us no end of shit about objectifying women, blah, blah, blah, blah like we don’t know that women don’t really look like that outside a photoshoot with 3 hours in make up and two days in photoshop. That we are just being manipulated to yackity, yackity, yackity, yak.
Seeing pretty girls is one of the most wonderful pleasures in a man’s life. On a bad day, it might be the only one.
Yeah, it’s an Israeli thing. The products are pretty uniquely Israeli, too*.
There’s an Israeli company which opens kiosks in American suburban malls, and hires young people to run them. The company rents the kids an apartment, and they work for a year or two, in long and very tiring shifts. It attracts young people wanting a bit of overseas adventure and a chance to make some good money, if they are aggressive salesmen.
LOL. Why did you chose to stop at that particular kiosk? Why did you chose to let a stranger feel you up? Did you want the product(s) or the attention? Was it because “This sales guy was a very attractive young man who was probably 24 or 25 with a delicious foreign accent and he was into me”?
You say you wanted “to be nice”. I can be nice to people without letting them touch me. It’s illegal for someone to “force” product samples on you. Why didn’t you call the police? Why didn’t you report him to mall management? Would you have stopped for an old, short, bald-head man, with a potbelly and a full Smith Brothers beard or he would have just been judged to be “creepy” or “unattractive” and you would have scurried off in some other direction before you’d let him rub anything on you?
Maybe the question isn’t why “sex sells” but rather why people prefer to “buy sex”?
Yes, I would have stopped for a short, bald-headed man. I’m married to a big, bald-headed man so I have a soft spot in my heart for the bald guys. I have, in fact, stopped and let people give me samples of product and demonstrate products on me many times without thought as to what they look like, their gender, or sexual orientation. If I’m not wearing nail polish I stop and let the ladies at the Egyptian manicure place demonstrate their products. I don’t actually own make-up beyond a tube of mascara but I’ve let the make-up people at various department stores give me a makeover multiple times because I’ve worked those type of jobs and it really sucks to have every single person who walks by tell you to go fuck yourself. I never buy anything because it is a product I don’t need or want but I like being kind to retail workers.
I didn’t call the police or report him to management because it was obviously a sales pitch and not a creepy guy following me around the mall.
I hate those guys. I let them stop me once, too, many years ago. The lotion is actually pretty good but you can get it elsewhere, without the hard sell. But I hate being pestered in the mall.
That being said, the OP has a very valid point. Everything sold to a man is designed to appeal to his sexuality. Everything sold to a woman is designed to make her feel like she’s not enough - not hot enough, not thin enough, not sexy enough, etc.
See, I know you think you are being nice and polite, but as someone who has been in sales his entire life, I’m telling you that you are NOT doing them a favor. You are actually wasting their time. I would rather just hear a “no” right up front than waste 15 minutes on someone who “never buy(s) anything because it is a product I don’t need or don’t want…”
The phrase is “I would rather hear a fast NO, then a long, drawn-out NO”.
You can be polite when declining sales pitch. A simple “I’m not interested” and continue walking, and there will be no hard feelings.
You do realize that many times after you’ve sat there and let the make-up girl spend 15 minutes working on you, when you get up and walk away with no sale, she is often thinking “all that work, and she obviously wasn’t going to buy a thing. What a bitch!”
They don’t let you say “no,” dude. I was caught and tried every polite way of declining a demonstration and every time there was a pause, the salesman grabbed my hands to move on to the next step. Or else my hands were covered with goop and I was trapped until I was given something to clean them with. This is serious hard-sell. It’s not something that’s easy to get away from
This reminds me of a Ren-Fair I went to once. Some lady with giant boobs in a low cut top runs up to me and starts massaging my neck with some wood thing. At the very same time a nicely chiseled beefy guy with his shirt off does the exact same thing to my girlfriend.
We just both sorta stood there, with our faces red as Washington apples, and enjoyed the moment. And of course, we bought two of their crappy little massager things that we never fucking used.
Actually I’ve been meaning to start a thread on this to ask about the actual Dead Sea salt product.
He first step is to cover your hands with this salt and rub it around for a while. Then they rinse it off into a bowl and show you how dark the water has become. This is pointed out to show you how good the salt is at cleansing, because you thought your hands were clean but regular soap doesn’t etc. etc. etc.
This is a scam, isn’t it? The color of the water doesn’t really demonstrate how much better the salt is at cleaning your skin, does it?
