Ornery Lot
Gun owners, that is. This post at Tam’s got me to thinking. Imagine if your local gun shop was ran like an internet forum.
Customer: Yes, I’m interested in buying an AR-15?
Gun Shop Person: I don’t carry those. They’re overpriced, finicky, and the round won’t even stop a small kitty. I carry AKs. You can fill the action with concrete then just add some motor oil for lube and it will fire. And it fires a man’s round!
Customer: But the AK has horrible ergonomics, the receivers are pounded into creation by cavemen with rocks and you couldn’t hit the side of a barn from inside the barn with one.
Gun Shop Person: Gamer
Customer: Cheapskate
**Pause**
Customer: Got any Glocks?
Gun Shop Person: Don’t even start.
Oddly, despite the internet’s various and sundry ABSOLUTE TRUTHS ABOUT ALL THINGS GUN, I’ve never had a gun shop employee try to talk me out of a gun. Unless they just didn’t sell it there.
October 28th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Really? You haven’t?
My journey to purchase the KelTec was fraught with gun store owners badmouthing their own wares.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:01 am
I always stand in awe at the sales ineptitude that runs rife in hobby businesses, and gun stores are no exception.
Watching a clerk badmouth their own merchandise is breathtaking in its idiocy. Hey, Zippy, if the Blastomatic 2000 blows goats so badly, why is it in your showcase?
October 28th, 2009 at 10:14 am
Depends. My local gunshop, that I had been going there for twenty years, tried to talk me out of a .380 Colt Mustang, once. I bought it, anyway. The next day he took it back for a Beretta. Maybe he wanted to push the Berettas, and maybe he didn’t think I was the right person for a single-action pocket auto. I think the second, because I was a good customer and it was a good store that tried to do well by its customers.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Another time, I went there with a friend who wanted to upgrade from his .38 Special revolver, for home defense. He looked at the Glocks which to him looked to work the same way but better. The salesman steered him to the high-capacity Beretta clones, pointing out the ambidextrous safeties, and the double-action trigger like his revolver, and pointedly mentioning the “hair-trigger” of the Glock.
It seems to me that a good gun store sells advice as well as merchandise.
October 28th, 2009 at 10:29 am
No one has talked you out of a gun because you are knowledgeable enough to know what you want and why.
I can’t say I’ve ever refused to sell a gun to someone (unless they were a suspicious character, etc) because I didn’t think the gun was right for them. I have said the following a few times:
“I’ll gladly sell that gun to you if you’re convinced it’s the one you want.”
That is usually followed up by things like:
“You’re probably better off going to (insert name of closest range that rents the guns they are interested in) and trying them all out before you decide to make your purchase. We stock these daily and we’ll have one for you if you decide it’s the right one for you. If we don’t have it when you come back, we can get it within a week.”
or:
“It’s been my experience that what you’re trying to accomplish will not be possible with that particular gun (95lb woman who’s never shot a gun before wanting to buy a S&W 340PD because it’s nice and lite and she plans on going to the range once a week with it). There is no one size fits all gun. I think that if you are going to get into shooting, you’ll find that guns are like footwear – you need one for the winter, one for the summer, one for dressing up for a night on the town, a few for fun, etc.”
October 28th, 2009 at 10:36 am
“It seems to me that a good gun store sells advice as well as merchandise.”
There’s a difference between helping a customer pick out the right style and size of shoes, and telling them “Aw, man, shoes suck! What you need are water skis!“
October 28th, 2009 at 10:38 am
I’m with Robb Allen, I’ve heard a good ammount of bad mouthing the products they sell at gun stores.
I don’t know how much of it is up selling, or how much of it is just honest opinion.
October 28th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Well, there’s no denying that a salesman needs only to know how to sell and not anything about what he sells. Where would Madison Street and Hollywood be, otherwise? 😉
October 28th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Once, while taking my gal’s Bersa (.380 CC) in for some warranty work, the guy behind the counter (I call him The Mouth of the South) told me “You shoulda spent an extra $200 and got yourself a Smith & Wesson.”
While I still did business with them, I never bought from Mouth directly. Someone else was getting the comission off my dollars.
Also, Bersa hooked me up with great work. Replaced the broken spring, some related parts, and gave the pistol a bit of a fluff n buff to boot. I was happy with their service.
October 28th, 2009 at 11:39 am
There’s two different shops around here, one has an indoor pistol range and is staffed by Hyper-Tactical-Timmy’s who will browbeat you into submission one way or another, over something or other. I can never tell what the point of that is, or why THEY MUST DOMINATE YOU!
The other shop is staffed by knowledgeable regular-types who may try to open your mind but they don’t push much. Stuff there sells itself – I’d love to work there.
I can’t bring myself to buy much from the range-shop, or even go there.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Clerks have handed me the gun I asked for, then pointed out several others in the case with similar features – which I consider a very good sales technique, not at all objectionable.
There was the time I was in my favorite gun store, and a customer was completing a deal for a rifle that involved some cash and a trade-in of a very nice Colt 1903 pistol. I saw him put the pistol on the counter in front of the sales clerk, and immediately butted in to ask if it was going on sale. With a small grumble about how he had thought of buying it himself, the salesman handed it over. I only gave it back, momentarily, for the serial number to be recorded on the trade-in and then the sale to me.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Had one experience a few years ago I swear would fit perfectly in an internet forum. I’d dropped by one of the larger shops in Central Jersey to restock some ammo, and asked for a few boxes of 10mm ammo.
Were this a normal shop, they’d either hand me what I asked for or they would tell me it was out of stock and when they might expect it in. The response I received was “why don’t you sell that piece of shit and get a .45”. I gave about five seconds waiting for the laugh, as if it were just a joke. Being met by nothing but silence and a scowl I walked out of the shop and have yet to return.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
As Tam noted – it’s not just gun shops. Any small-market small business can have it happen. I’ve seen it in gaming and comic stores (overlap, but not one set), computer sellers (including some big-box types!) as well as gun stores. I ended up buying a bore snake someplace other than the store I bought my gun at because the guy who sold me the gun (otherwise quite excellent) insisted they were crap and I should get a regular cleaning kit only. Since I had already been advised of the goodness of bore snakes by Armed Canadian, my marine buddy, and a couple of other shooters at work; I humored him and spent my money elsewhere.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
My issue with gun stores is that the people behind the counter are often more interested in shootin’ the breeze with their friends than helping customers who want to give them money.
I worked in a camera store for a few years in my youth, so I understand that there’s a lot of maroons out there that just want to fondle something they’ll never, ever have the money to actually buy. I also know that there’s also a lot of people who talk a good game but don’t buy squat, but good customer service means, at the very least, that you acknowledge the potential customer that walks in your door and sooner or later ask them if there’s something they want.
There’s three shops around me that don’t do that. The proprietors sit behind the counter, talking with their friends, and I have to walk up and wait for a lull in the conversation before I can give them my money.
I don’t shop at those places anymore. Fortunately, I have a choice where I live, and I chose to frequent a smaller pawn shop with people who know that purpose of owning a retail store is selling stuff to customers, not running a live version of gun chat room.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Your own firearm is always better than anyone else’s.
Everyone else’s blows goats.
October 28th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
You forgot the dialogue that would occur if the customer wanted to buy a Ruger SR-556:
Customer: Do you have any of those new Ruger AR rifles?
Clerk: F*ck Ruger! Do you know what Bill Ruger said in 1989 about high-capacity magazines?
October 28th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Eh, I’ve subtly steered guys away from buying light J-frame .38s for their wives. I’d rather not be party to some woman deciding she really hates guns because her hubby got her a wildly inappropriate gun.
OTOH, I’ve directly badmouthed Taurus revolvers. They regularly come from the distributor broken, for crap’s sake.
October 28th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Eh, two more stores in the vicinity probed. One is an expansive site and a “hunter’s club” where conversation between principals never ceases and your intrusion into the club is acknowledged gruffly. No tire-kicking, no lookie-loo, don’t make anybody move the paperwork strewn across two counters and hiding rows of pistols.
The other is a smaller clubhouse, a tree-fort at best – strewn with tactical tickles. Some attention is paid but mostly just because it’s hard to ignored you – and by paying attention I really mean YOU are paying attention to THEM – and all the glorious tattoos rippling across brawny muscles. And the tactical insights they offer are for YOUR benefit. You really should know, and if you didn’t, NOW you do.
October 29th, 2009 at 8:15 am
I can do without the blowhard 1911-fetishists. They seem to be the ones most likely to pass negative judgement on non-1911 handguns.
October 29th, 2009 at 9:20 am
I once had some yahoo tell me that the SAA was built for left handed people because A) Sam Colt was a Lefty and B) it lets you maintain a “fighting grip” on the gun. I declined to tell him that keeping a grip and the gun stocks was potentially a better advantage of a auto than the extra ammo it carries. Instead, I told him that most right-handed people cannot do fine motor skills, like work levers, with their left hand “under stress”.
He would hear none of it. He also said bird-shot was good for self-defense because “I never meet anyone who wanted to be shot with it.” My reply was “Do you WANT to be slapped? Doesn’t make it a good man-stopper does it?”
When I asked him what he considered the minimum effective load for a shotgun was, he replied: “Oh, I wouldn’t use a shotgun, I’d use a carbine!”
Now, I like carbines too, but that was just stupid…
October 29th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Gun Shop Commandos have driven me out of quite a few shops.
October 31st, 2009 at 12:27 pm
And sometimes the “clerk” is faced with the dilemma of having something in the sales case that on paper appears perfect for one job when in reality it’s wholly, utterly flawed.
case in point; small 9mm handgun, locked breech, manual safety, double stack but still somewhat pocketable. Lightweight but beefy alloy insert in polymer frame. Fit and finish good. Price is inexpensive at out-the-door around $250. Feel is average, DA trigger is smooth but long with light to moderate weight.
I’ve described the perfect “baby’s first concealed carry pistol”, right? Beautiful set of attributes for a starter?
I described the Skyy CX-1. And all the above is true, and it seems made for the starter CCW crowd.
The unfortunate truth is, the alloy in the frame is either wrong or wrongly treated, and by the time you have 4 boxes of practice ammo in it, the barrel pin has egged the hole in the frame and the displaced metal is in position to completely tie the pistol up in a few more firings. And I mean “repeated hammer blows to disassemble” kind of seizing failure, after just enough rounds to get used to the pistol.
You can see why I ended up steering the new CC’ers away from the gun, even though it appears absolutely suited. Actually ended up only recommended it to people coming in looking for a cheap used anything to throw in the glovebox of the spare vehicle…
The salesman’s paradox is that you are charged with selling any item in the store, but selling a given item for an incorrect purpose only damages future relations with the customer, and to avoid the situation sometimes means convincing the customer that he/she is not (always) right. To simply give in and let it go is short-sighted, but the act of steering the buyer bears the risk of alienation. To steer without insult is where the art of the sell is.
It’s also in many other places, like how to broaden horizons without befuddling, but that’s beyond the scope 🙂
November 1st, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Strangegun,
There’s a huge difference between steering customers away from a known, documented piece of crap (not alleged, but documented), and badmouthing any gun that isn’t what Jeff Cooper liked.
Personally, I would not have sold a piece of crap like the CX-1 no matter what. The problems it would give the customer down the road will sour that customer on you and your establishment (if it doesn’t kaboom and injure them so they can sue you), no matter how many disclaimers you issue at the time of purchase.