Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Coffee beans and little white sticks

According to most of you, the way to meet people at a store is to come up with some way of incorporating whatever the interesting person is looking at into a conversation. Yesterday I had some practice at this. I was at a beauty store looking for some perfume for my sister for Christmas. A while back I got a catalog in the mail that had an envelop full of perfume samples. I was curious and decided to smell them and found two that I liked. I kept them handy because I thought they might make for a fun gift for my sister.

While I was at the store, I was again surprised about how expensive beauty products are. In this case, the small bottle of what I wanted to get was over $90. It was hard for me to understand because there were other similarly sized bottles of the same brand, just a different smell I guess, for much cheaper. Maybe what I was looking at used rarer ingredients, I don't know, but I wasn't feeling to happy about spending 90 dollars on a bottle of perfume, for my sister of all people, when I don't know if she is even going to like it. But then I found a small sample pack of four scents all of the same brand that included the one I wanted to get, and for much cheaper. Plus, I thought getting the sample pack would be more fun for my sister to experiment with, in case she didn't like what I wanted for her.

My only trouble was there was a girl standing right next to me who was sniffing away. And everytime she tried something she'd put it right back down and say something like, "Lord have mercy, that is nasty. Who'd want to wear something like that. emmhmmm that's gross." And so on. This worried me because I started thinking that maybe what I had chosen wasn't any good after all. I looked at her until she looked at me, and thrust my perfume of choice at her and said, "Alright, try this one and tell me what you think." "Mmmmh, I like that." "Please, be as honest with this as you were with all these others, this is supposed to be a Christmas present." "Oh no, I like this, I'd wear this. You can get this." So hopefully my sister will agree with the sniffer. And no, I did not pursue any further conversation with this very interesting lady.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, maybe this wasn't a lady that you wanted to pursue, but that it a good strategy! Go into a beauty products store, find a cute lady, and say that you want her opinion on something for your sister. It's a non-weird way to ease into a conversation, and she'll be impressed that you are thoughtful about what gift to get for your sister!

WAM