{"id":290,"date":"2013-10-04T14:20:01","date_gmt":"2013-10-04T18:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bendroth.org\/?p=290"},"modified":"2015-08-27T20:36:55","modified_gmt":"2015-08-28T00:36:55","slug":"retail-evangelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/?p=290","title":{"rendered":"Retail Evangelist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Retail evangelist<\/em><\/strong>
\nWhat I learned selling shoes<\/p>\n

The Christian Century<\/em>, Sep 23, 2013 by Norman B. Bendroth<\/p>\n

One year when I was between interim gigs I became a sales\u00a0associate at Macy\u2019s. I\u2019d be a natural, I thought, and so I took a job\u00a0selling women\u2019s shoes.\u00a0When I alerted Facebook friends to my new vocation, one of them\u00a0sent me a cartoon of a medieval painting of Jesus washing his\u00a0disciples\u2019 feet. A disciple asked the kneeling Jesus, \u201cDo you have\u00a0these in a 10EE?\u201d and Jesus replied, \u201cLet me check in back.\u201d\u00a0Despite my initial confidence, the job had a steep learning curve. After all, my last retail job had been during college, and
\nthings had changed. Every morning, the management and staff started the day with a rally in the handbag section. We\u00a0applauded sales associates who had opened the most new accounts, cheered if we had reached our sales goal the day\u00a0before, and heard pep talks about new sales goals. We left with an injection of \u201catta-boy\u201d adrenalin.<\/p>\n

This retail evangelism or \u201cMacy\u2019s magic\u201d wasn\u2019t unlike church outreach training. Make contact, our Macy\u2019s supervisors told\u00a0us. Ask open-ended questions. Give suggestions. Inspire the sale. Finally, celebrate the sale. We never understood what\u00a0that last directive meant\u2014dance around a cash register?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same at church. Make contact\u2014What brings you to church today? Ask open-ended questions\u2014What are you looking \u00a0for in a church? Give suggestions\u2014We have an amazing youth group that may interest your teenagers. Inspire the sale\u2014We need questioning, searching people like you in our congregation. Finally, celebrate the sale\u2014I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll enjoy it\u00a0here. It seems like a good fit for you and for us.<\/p>\n

Yet the real business of selling shoes was about a lot more than a smile and an encouraging comment\u2014it was rigorous\u00a0and challenging. I lost ten pounds running back and forth to the stock room, where I\u2019d search frantically for one particular\u00a0shoe in shelves of shoeboxes that ran ten feet high and 300 feet long. Incredibly, we learned where things were. One day Iasked a fellow sales associate where the Nine West medium-heeled pumps in gray alligator skin were located, and\u00a0without missing a beat he said, \u201cAisle 9 on the right about a third of the way up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The customer base was as diverse as the shoe selections. Families from Colombia, Haiti and Greece would buy 15 to 20\u00a0pairs of shoes during markdowns using one coupon at a time to get maximum savings. I asked one Colombian gentleman\u00a0why he wanted so many shoes. \u201cI\u2019m sending them home,\u201d he said. Aging women would find the one shoe that fit just right
\nand buy three pairs in different colors.<\/p>\n

Doses of hard-won common courtesy went a long way. I was ringing up the purchase of a woman who was trying to\u00a0squeeze every dime she could out of available discounts. She asked how much 15 percent off would be. I did a rough\u00a0estimate in my head, but that wasn\u2019t enough; she wanted a sales slip on each item to prove it. When I told her that this was\u00a0not possible, she raised her voice. I responded as calmly as I could while mentally sticking pins into her.<\/p>\n

The most satisfying part of the experience was working with sales associates from all over the world. Asar from Egypt told\u00a0me about Coptic Christianity. Daryl from the Dominican Republic showed up late for mass because he forgot that we were\u00a0on daylight savings time. A young Indian woman was a nominal Hindu who had been educated in Episcopalian schools.<\/p>\n

I became kind of a surreptitious chaplain for them all. Indira cried on my shoulder after being chewed out by her first rude\u00a0American customer. Maitea told me about her weekly trips to take her dad for dialysis. One colleague had a sluggard\u00a0boyfriend who wouldn\u2019t get a job, another couldn\u2019t make ends meet, and still another showed me pictures of his daughter\u2019s\u00a0graduation. My Ugandan colleague asked for help in picking out a good used car.<\/p>\n

The old divines speak of common grace and special grace, the later being the grace that comes to those who trust Christ;\u00a0common grace is the glue that holds families, neighborhoods, cities and the world together in the midst of all of our fussing\u00a0and fuming. For those few months in the world of retail I saw how common grace holds a disparate group of people\u00a0together.<\/p>\n

Every pastor should work at Macy\u2019s. He or she will learn how to punch a clock, take only a half hour lunch, meet a sales\u00a0goal, work under a boss, deal with irritating customers and toil alongside people who have no choice but to come in the\u00a0next day and do it all over again. I could not hide behind a divinity degree or brag about things I\u2019ve accomplished; I had to
\nprove that I could sell shoes. I\u2019ve said a lot in sermons about how we\u2019re all equal, but in the shoe department this was real.<\/p>\n

It was an odd place to learn how to be a better pastor, a better husband and father and a better human<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.christiancentury.org\/article\/2013-09\/retail-evangelist<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Retail evangelist What I learned selling shoes The Christian Century, Sep 23, 2013 by Norman B. Bendroth One year when I was between interim gigs I became a sales\u00a0associate at Macy\u2019s. I\u2019d be a natural, I thought, and so I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292,"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendroth.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}