The Hunters and Gatherers of Hayes Valley
May 2016
At 6:30 my alarm blares that charmingly obnoxious jingle that Apple has named “Apex”. After pressing snooze two or three times I roll out of bed, grasp around for my glasses, and squeeze into my Lululemon leggings and tank top. After splashing my face with cold water I head out the door for the gym, thoroughly regretting the decision to drink that extra glass of wine last night.
An hour and a half and 10 miles of the stationary bike later, I am back home, chugging my coffee and curling my hair while scrolling instagram–looking for inspiration. What kind of aesthetic am I going for today? Boho chic, wannabe hypebeast, or sophisticated “I don’t give a f***” (pardon my French). 10:30 on the dot, I’m out the door heading to the corner of Hayes and Gough.
Depending on the speed of my walk I generally am knocking on the door of Azalea by 10:52, just enough time to throw my stuff in my cubby, check my lipstick, hug my managers, Brian and Miya, and clock-in before the store opens at 11.
Azalea is the longest standing boutique in Hayes Valley, having been there for just over 13 years. It is one of the five stores owned by three very successful business women, Cat, Karen, and Carina.
Azalea was the first, it’s a one stop destination, a place where, supposedly, everyone can find something they like. The price range is moderate, meaning most everything is between $20 and $200, with a few outliers. We carry both men and women’s clothing, jewelry, shoes, accessories, and are most popular for our entire back wall of denim.
There are two Azalea’s in the city – the original Hayes Street one and another location in the Mission district which opened about two years ago. Right next door to our Hayes Valley location is our sister store, Rand + Statler. R+S exudes sophistication–the black wood floors, the Aesop pop-up shop, and the associates clad all in black, all with diamonds dripping from their cigarette holding hands. This is the fancy big sister in the Azalea family. Rand + Statler is the kind of place where if you have to ask for the price, you probably shouldn’t be shopping there. Most everything hanging on the black wooden hangers in R+S has a designer label on it, the most popular being Comme des Garçons and Alexander Wang. Around the corner, up on Gough Street, is the brother store of the family, Welcome Stranger, where we sell only men’s clothing. It smells strongly of sandalwood and leather in there and you’d half expect that every purchase comes with a complimentary shaving kit and artisanally made pipe. There is another Welcome Stranger across the Bay in Berkeley, but I’ve never ventured that far.
At Azalea on Hayes, not to be mistaken with Azalea on Valencia, we are the most successful. We are the breadwinners of the family. This is partly due to the fact that we are the oldest, but we also happen to have the best selection of merchandise. We also have the best team, not that I’m biased. The 411 Hayes Squad is a strong one, comparable maybe to T-Swift’s squad.
Each day begins relatively the same. The squad gathers around Miya, the assistant manager, in a pregame huddle. She holds a little blue notebook in her sparkly acrylic nail decked hands on which she has written the daily goal in her large looping handwriting. Under the goal she has written the names of the squad members, whoever is there that day, and where they are to work. She doesn’t really have to do that, everyone knows their place. Everyone has certain strengths, places we work best.
Michael and I always work at the front, the two overachievers, the only two who never mess up the register and the only two who know how to sell jewelry.
Brian and Miya always “float”, doing managerial things. Kaleigh, the tiny, Kate Moss-esque blonde, works the door, welcoming people in with her bright, cheery smile.
Alec, the oh so cool guy with the shoulder length black hair works denim along with Connie, the resident model with big lips and a long legs. Darian and Lou work the shoe and sale sections, but honestly most of the time they just flirt with pretty girls, which isn’t necessarily working but still helps sell.
Alexis, the goofy girl with a propensity to make everyone feel good about themselves, works the fitting rooms. She can often be found dancing with the customers while drinking her yerba maté.
Before sending us all off to our places Miya gives us some “churching”– some little bit of wisdom she wishes to impart on us all to make us better workers and better people. It’s usually something she picked up from a self help book or a motivational video, things that most everyone has heard over and over again but nevertheless seems uplifting. Her most favorite bit of advice being, “how you do anything is how you do everything.”
Once everyone is in place and the customers begin to enter, the game begins. There are two main types of customers to come into the store, the hunters and the gatherers. The hunters are those on a mission. They come in knowing exactly what they want, hunt it down, scope it out, and go in for the kill, with their credit card. These people are usually men looking for new jeans or the occasional woman who doesn’t have time for frivolous shopping and knows she needs a pair of tan mules for work. These are the easiest sales, unless of course their prey is unavailable, in which case they leave dejected with figurative tails between their legs.
Then there are the gatherers, those who walk through every rack, grabbing each and every thing that pops out to them. With these gatherers, the sales associates then become the hunters. Approaching cautiously at first we offer to get a room started with the first two or three items picked up by the unwitting customer. We strike up a conversation, get to know them a bit, feel out the water before diving in.
“Hi there, can I get a fitting room started for you?” I’ll say as I approach the gal with two or three items slung over her arm.
“Oh yes! That would be nice. You guys have such cute stuff,” she will respond.
“Great!” I exclaim with a smile, “Can I have your first name please?”
She will then respond with her name, usually something like Emily, Caitlyn, Sara, Laura, or any number of the popular names from the mid 80’s and 90’s.
“Caitlyn, I’m Justice, are you looking for anything particular today?” I then ask, testing to see where this sale is going to go. There are a few general responses to this question. Either they are looking for something specific, like a professional outfit to wear while giving a Tedx talk, as did a human rights lawyer named Flynn Coleman recently, or they are looking for something broader, such as things to brighten up their wardrobe for spring. The current popular response is “I’m looking for things to wear to Coachella”, to which I usually have to suppress a slight groan (does Coachella even realize how not cool it is now?).
Generally, though, people don’t know what they are looking for and are just browsing to see what they like. Before leaving them to get their room started I will tell them to holler if they need any help. Taking note of their style of dress and the sizes of pieces they pulled I then bring their pieces to Alexis at the fitting rooms and tell her their name to put on the chalkboard outside each room.
I then do a quick go through the racks myself, doing some gathering of my own. I’ll grab a minimum of two pieces exactly like the things my customer already pulled and one piece that I just love, and put these pieces in with the rest of their stuff. After my own gathering, I return to said customer, who has no doubt by this point found some more goodies, and offer to add these to their room.
“Oh yes, please,” they will say.
To which I respond, “I also pulled a few other things I thought would look good on you, please feel free to ignore them”. This is generally received with much thanks and enthusiasm. Depending on the level of enthusiasm, I might grab more pieces to add to their room before returning to my station at the register and jewelry counter. Once I know my customer has been safely shown to her room I pop back every ten to fifteen minutes to check in and see how things are going. This is the time I try to connect with them.
The key to making a sale is human connection. People, for the most part, aren’t complete idiots – they know when you are just trying to make a sale. Everyone knows, in their heart of hearts, when they look good and when they look bad and if I tell someone they look fabulous when they don’t, and they know they don’t, they will know I am lying and just want to sell stuff and make money.
I hate it when other salespeople do this to me.
I try to be as honest as possible. I need the customer to trust me or I am not doing my job right. Once I have gained their trust, that is when the sale is made. Once everything has been tried on and selections made they come up to the register, we chat, they pull out their credit card, and the deal is sealed. Not to toot my own horn, but 9 times out of 10, a customer I have helped leaves with something I picked out for them. And the more I, or any of my squad, brings for a customer, the more they tend to spend. It’s a dangerous hole they let us take them down. We aren’t commission based, but there are certain perks to having big sales. Positive reinforcement is a strong force, especially when it comes in the form of free clothes for us poor college students.
There are of course times when this whole scene I just laid out goes horribly wrong. There are times when the customer does not, under any circumstance, want to be helped and seems almost offended when you offer to even get a room started for them. These are the people who get offended by everything though and there is really nothing we can do to help them at this point.
Then there are those who do not like anything, even though they tried on essentially the entire store and leave in a huff, leaving each piece of clothing in a pile on the floor of the fitting room or, even worse, hung up inside out on the wrong hangers. They leave annoyed that nothing we have looks good on them, despite the fact that they have a perfect body and in reality everything looks good on them. These customers usually come with the added bonus of walking into the store three minutes before closing. They’re just delightful (*cue eye rolling*).
In Hayes Valley, which tries so hard to remain a small, friendly neighborhood of locals, we don’t have too many nasty customers.
I can’t even imagine what it is like working in a mall or department store. Most everyone who comes into the store is kind and understanding, ready to be helped and open to suggestion. They also generally understand the neighborhood and clientele and are thus aware of how much they are going to spend in a boutique like ours. Hayes Valley is at the base of Pacific Heights and a few blocks away from City Center. The coffee shops there charge $5 for a latte and to eat brunch at one of the popular restaurants you should be prepared to pay at least $25 per person.
Most everyone knows this when entering the neighborhood – come to think of it most everyone should know this when entering San Francisco, nevertheless there are those who must find a way to bargain. It’s as if in order to justify their purchases they must feel as if they fought for it – haggled to the point of desperation. The thing that I don’t think many customers understand is that I, as a sales associate, actually have no control over the price of the products. I know, it sound shocking. Perhaps if there is legitimately something wrong with the garment, like a hole or defective zipper, I can get 15% off for the customer. But when a lovely individual comes up to me and asks for a discount for absolutely no reason I have to wonder if they confused our nice boutique for a flea market.
In retail you hear, “the customer is always right.”
Well, no. In fact, the customer is usually wrong, but we have to make them feel like they are right and that we are doing everything we possibly can to help them. Sometimes that means actually sending countless emails trying to get them a special size that we don’t generally order. Or, sometimes it means hanging out in the backstock room watching YouTube videos for 15 minutes with your manager, pretending you are discussing giving a customer a return, even though they bought the garment over two months ago and the return policy is only good for 14 days. It’s all about appearances.
Of course we do care for our customers, but we also care for our jobs and our company and we can’t run a successful company if we just do whatever the customer wants us to do. We have to help the customers to the best of our ability, and that scale is often different to us than to the customers.
After a while of working at one place, you get to know the clientele.
Not just the individual customers who come in often, like big Mike and his dog Rocko, who come in every Saturday, or Ivy who works at the hair salon next door and wears Miu Miu’s every day, but also the kind of people who come into the store.
There are the tech guys who come in wearing their khakis and t-shirts, who generally buy five of the same shirt.
The moms with their kids, whom they’ve just picked up from ballet rehearsal at the nearby Academy, who come in to find a new blouse to wear to dinner. The gaggle of girls wearing head-to-toe Lululemon who generally have just come from brunch and need to find dresses to wear going out–it’s always impossible to discern what these girls do to make money but they obviously have plenty of it. We also get a large number of tourists, many from Australia, Canada, China, and Sweden. Each customer is different, but each fall into one of the market categories. And each of those fall into the two categories of hunter and gatherer.
After a couple hours of trying to play catch with the gatherers, luring them into trying on more and more, getting deeper and deeper into the store, and the occasional interaction with a hunter, generally just when checking them out, I am exhausted.
At 3pm I take a 30 minute lunch break, where I eat an overpriced salad and drink an Almond milk Chai. Sometimes on break I will run into people I helped earlier in the day and I never really know what to do. In the shop we have our places, I am there to serve. But out in the real world, what is our relationship? Shop girl and townspeople? I tend to just not make any eye contact.
Before heading back to the floor, I take a quick gander on Instagram and Snapchat to see what the rest of the world is up to and gaze longingly at my friends’ beach picnics and museums trips.
The next three and half hours look much like the first four did, however as the clock ticks closer to 7 I can feel my “people-person” personality drifting away and my “get-me-in-bed-right-away-with-netflix-and-take-out-right-now” side starting to show.
There is a direct correlation between the time I spend with customers and the distance between the hour hand and the 7 on my watch.
Finally, at 7 pm we turn off the music, bring in the sign from outside, close the door, and flip the switch on the chandelier in the front. Miya makes an announcement that the store is now closed and the register will be “automatically” turning off in 10 minutes, which isn’t exactly how it works but it gets people out. I then turn to the racks and begin straightening them, making sure everything is in size order, in the right place, and the store looks in tip-top shape, just for it to be rummaged through again in 16 hours.
After making sure the store looks good and the fine jewelry has been locked away in the back I collect my backpack from my cubby, put on my comfortable shoes, and say goodnight to the squad.
The walk home takes almost twice as long due to the hills. I get home at 8 and flop on the floor to stare at the wall for a good 15 minutes, thoroughly exhausted.
Every night is the same, bed singing a sweet song, calling for me. I stay strong, am not seduced by the allure of sleep and drag myself up, go to the kitchen to heat up some food. I return to my room, sit at my desk, open my computer, and begin to work. The day is not over yet, there is still much to be done.
An hour and a half and 10 miles of the stationary bike later, I am back home, chugging my coffee and curling my hair while scrolling instagram–looking for inspiration. What kind of aesthetic am I going for today? Boho chic, wannabe hypebeast, or sophisticated “I don’t give a f***” (pardon my French). 10:30 on the dot, I’m out the door heading to the corner of Hayes and Gough.
Depending on the speed of my walk I generally am knocking on the door of Azalea by 10:52, just enough time to throw my stuff in my cubby, check my lipstick, hug my managers, Brian and Miya, and clock-in before the store opens at 11.
Azalea is the longest standing boutique in Hayes Valley, having been there for just over 13 years. It is one of the five stores owned by three very successful business women, Cat, Karen, and Carina.
Azalea was the first, it’s a one stop destination, a place where, supposedly, everyone can find something they like. The price range is moderate, meaning most everything is between $20 and $200, with a few outliers. We carry both men and women’s clothing, jewelry, shoes, accessories, and are most popular for our entire back wall of denim.
There are two Azalea’s in the city – the original Hayes Street one and another location in the Mission district which opened about two years ago. Right next door to our Hayes Valley location is our sister store, Rand + Statler. R+S exudes sophistication–the black wood floors, the Aesop pop-up shop, and the associates clad all in black, all with diamonds dripping from their cigarette holding hands. This is the fancy big sister in the Azalea family. Rand + Statler is the kind of place where if you have to ask for the price, you probably shouldn’t be shopping there. Most everything hanging on the black wooden hangers in R+S has a designer label on it, the most popular being Comme des Garçons and Alexander Wang. Around the corner, up on Gough Street, is the brother store of the family, Welcome Stranger, where we sell only men’s clothing. It smells strongly of sandalwood and leather in there and you’d half expect that every purchase comes with a complimentary shaving kit and artisanally made pipe. There is another Welcome Stranger across the Bay in Berkeley, but I’ve never ventured that far.
At Azalea on Hayes, not to be mistaken with Azalea on Valencia, we are the most successful. We are the breadwinners of the family. This is partly due to the fact that we are the oldest, but we also happen to have the best selection of merchandise. We also have the best team, not that I’m biased. The 411 Hayes Squad is a strong one, comparable maybe to T-Swift’s squad.
Each day begins relatively the same. The squad gathers around Miya, the assistant manager, in a pregame huddle. She holds a little blue notebook in her sparkly acrylic nail decked hands on which she has written the daily goal in her large looping handwriting. Under the goal she has written the names of the squad members, whoever is there that day, and where they are to work. She doesn’t really have to do that, everyone knows their place. Everyone has certain strengths, places we work best.
Michael and I always work at the front, the two overachievers, the only two who never mess up the register and the only two who know how to sell jewelry.
Brian and Miya always “float”, doing managerial things. Kaleigh, the tiny, Kate Moss-esque blonde, works the door, welcoming people in with her bright, cheery smile.
Alec, the oh so cool guy with the shoulder length black hair works denim along with Connie, the resident model with big lips and a long legs. Darian and Lou work the shoe and sale sections, but honestly most of the time they just flirt with pretty girls, which isn’t necessarily working but still helps sell.
Alexis, the goofy girl with a propensity to make everyone feel good about themselves, works the fitting rooms. She can often be found dancing with the customers while drinking her yerba maté.
Before sending us all off to our places Miya gives us some “churching”– some little bit of wisdom she wishes to impart on us all to make us better workers and better people. It’s usually something she picked up from a self help book or a motivational video, things that most everyone has heard over and over again but nevertheless seems uplifting. Her most favorite bit of advice being, “how you do anything is how you do everything.”
Once everyone is in place and the customers begin to enter, the game begins. There are two main types of customers to come into the store, the hunters and the gatherers. The hunters are those on a mission. They come in knowing exactly what they want, hunt it down, scope it out, and go in for the kill, with their credit card. These people are usually men looking for new jeans or the occasional woman who doesn’t have time for frivolous shopping and knows she needs a pair of tan mules for work. These are the easiest sales, unless of course their prey is unavailable, in which case they leave dejected with figurative tails between their legs.
Then there are the gatherers, those who walk through every rack, grabbing each and every thing that pops out to them. With these gatherers, the sales associates then become the hunters. Approaching cautiously at first we offer to get a room started with the first two or three items picked up by the unwitting customer. We strike up a conversation, get to know them a bit, feel out the water before diving in.
“Hi there, can I get a fitting room started for you?” I’ll say as I approach the gal with two or three items slung over her arm.
“Oh yes! That would be nice. You guys have such cute stuff,” she will respond.
“Great!” I exclaim with a smile, “Can I have your first name please?”
She will then respond with her name, usually something like Emily, Caitlyn, Sara, Laura, or any number of the popular names from the mid 80’s and 90’s.
“Caitlyn, I’m Justice, are you looking for anything particular today?” I then ask, testing to see where this sale is going to go. There are a few general responses to this question. Either they are looking for something specific, like a professional outfit to wear while giving a Tedx talk, as did a human rights lawyer named Flynn Coleman recently, or they are looking for something broader, such as things to brighten up their wardrobe for spring. The current popular response is “I’m looking for things to wear to Coachella”, to which I usually have to suppress a slight groan (does Coachella even realize how not cool it is now?).
Generally, though, people don’t know what they are looking for and are just browsing to see what they like. Before leaving them to get their room started I will tell them to holler if they need any help. Taking note of their style of dress and the sizes of pieces they pulled I then bring their pieces to Alexis at the fitting rooms and tell her their name to put on the chalkboard outside each room.
I then do a quick go through the racks myself, doing some gathering of my own. I’ll grab a minimum of two pieces exactly like the things my customer already pulled and one piece that I just love, and put these pieces in with the rest of their stuff. After my own gathering, I return to said customer, who has no doubt by this point found some more goodies, and offer to add these to their room.
“Oh yes, please,” they will say.
To which I respond, “I also pulled a few other things I thought would look good on you, please feel free to ignore them”. This is generally received with much thanks and enthusiasm. Depending on the level of enthusiasm, I might grab more pieces to add to their room before returning to my station at the register and jewelry counter. Once I know my customer has been safely shown to her room I pop back every ten to fifteen minutes to check in and see how things are going. This is the time I try to connect with them.
The key to making a sale is human connection. People, for the most part, aren’t complete idiots – they know when you are just trying to make a sale. Everyone knows, in their heart of hearts, when they look good and when they look bad and if I tell someone they look fabulous when they don’t, and they know they don’t, they will know I am lying and just want to sell stuff and make money.
I hate it when other salespeople do this to me.
I try to be as honest as possible. I need the customer to trust me or I am not doing my job right. Once I have gained their trust, that is when the sale is made. Once everything has been tried on and selections made they come up to the register, we chat, they pull out their credit card, and the deal is sealed. Not to toot my own horn, but 9 times out of 10, a customer I have helped leaves with something I picked out for them. And the more I, or any of my squad, brings for a customer, the more they tend to spend. It’s a dangerous hole they let us take them down. We aren’t commission based, but there are certain perks to having big sales. Positive reinforcement is a strong force, especially when it comes in the form of free clothes for us poor college students.
There are of course times when this whole scene I just laid out goes horribly wrong. There are times when the customer does not, under any circumstance, want to be helped and seems almost offended when you offer to even get a room started for them. These are the people who get offended by everything though and there is really nothing we can do to help them at this point.
Then there are those who do not like anything, even though they tried on essentially the entire store and leave in a huff, leaving each piece of clothing in a pile on the floor of the fitting room or, even worse, hung up inside out on the wrong hangers. They leave annoyed that nothing we have looks good on them, despite the fact that they have a perfect body and in reality everything looks good on them. These customers usually come with the added bonus of walking into the store three minutes before closing. They’re just delightful (*cue eye rolling*).
In Hayes Valley, which tries so hard to remain a small, friendly neighborhood of locals, we don’t have too many nasty customers.
I can’t even imagine what it is like working in a mall or department store. Most everyone who comes into the store is kind and understanding, ready to be helped and open to suggestion. They also generally understand the neighborhood and clientele and are thus aware of how much they are going to spend in a boutique like ours. Hayes Valley is at the base of Pacific Heights and a few blocks away from City Center. The coffee shops there charge $5 for a latte and to eat brunch at one of the popular restaurants you should be prepared to pay at least $25 per person.
Most everyone knows this when entering the neighborhood – come to think of it most everyone should know this when entering San Francisco, nevertheless there are those who must find a way to bargain. It’s as if in order to justify their purchases they must feel as if they fought for it – haggled to the point of desperation. The thing that I don’t think many customers understand is that I, as a sales associate, actually have no control over the price of the products. I know, it sound shocking. Perhaps if there is legitimately something wrong with the garment, like a hole or defective zipper, I can get 15% off for the customer. But when a lovely individual comes up to me and asks for a discount for absolutely no reason I have to wonder if they confused our nice boutique for a flea market.
In retail you hear, “the customer is always right.”
Well, no. In fact, the customer is usually wrong, but we have to make them feel like they are right and that we are doing everything we possibly can to help them. Sometimes that means actually sending countless emails trying to get them a special size that we don’t generally order. Or, sometimes it means hanging out in the backstock room watching YouTube videos for 15 minutes with your manager, pretending you are discussing giving a customer a return, even though they bought the garment over two months ago and the return policy is only good for 14 days. It’s all about appearances.
Of course we do care for our customers, but we also care for our jobs and our company and we can’t run a successful company if we just do whatever the customer wants us to do. We have to help the customers to the best of our ability, and that scale is often different to us than to the customers.
After a while of working at one place, you get to know the clientele.
Not just the individual customers who come in often, like big Mike and his dog Rocko, who come in every Saturday, or Ivy who works at the hair salon next door and wears Miu Miu’s every day, but also the kind of people who come into the store.
There are the tech guys who come in wearing their khakis and t-shirts, who generally buy five of the same shirt.
The moms with their kids, whom they’ve just picked up from ballet rehearsal at the nearby Academy, who come in to find a new blouse to wear to dinner. The gaggle of girls wearing head-to-toe Lululemon who generally have just come from brunch and need to find dresses to wear going out–it’s always impossible to discern what these girls do to make money but they obviously have plenty of it. We also get a large number of tourists, many from Australia, Canada, China, and Sweden. Each customer is different, but each fall into one of the market categories. And each of those fall into the two categories of hunter and gatherer.
After a couple hours of trying to play catch with the gatherers, luring them into trying on more and more, getting deeper and deeper into the store, and the occasional interaction with a hunter, generally just when checking them out, I am exhausted.
At 3pm I take a 30 minute lunch break, where I eat an overpriced salad and drink an Almond milk Chai. Sometimes on break I will run into people I helped earlier in the day and I never really know what to do. In the shop we have our places, I am there to serve. But out in the real world, what is our relationship? Shop girl and townspeople? I tend to just not make any eye contact.
Before heading back to the floor, I take a quick gander on Instagram and Snapchat to see what the rest of the world is up to and gaze longingly at my friends’ beach picnics and museums trips.
The next three and half hours look much like the first four did, however as the clock ticks closer to 7 I can feel my “people-person” personality drifting away and my “get-me-in-bed-right-away-with-netflix-and-take-out-right-now” side starting to show.
There is a direct correlation between the time I spend with customers and the distance between the hour hand and the 7 on my watch.
Finally, at 7 pm we turn off the music, bring in the sign from outside, close the door, and flip the switch on the chandelier in the front. Miya makes an announcement that the store is now closed and the register will be “automatically” turning off in 10 minutes, which isn’t exactly how it works but it gets people out. I then turn to the racks and begin straightening them, making sure everything is in size order, in the right place, and the store looks in tip-top shape, just for it to be rummaged through again in 16 hours.
After making sure the store looks good and the fine jewelry has been locked away in the back I collect my backpack from my cubby, put on my comfortable shoes, and say goodnight to the squad.
The walk home takes almost twice as long due to the hills. I get home at 8 and flop on the floor to stare at the wall for a good 15 minutes, thoroughly exhausted.
Every night is the same, bed singing a sweet song, calling for me. I stay strong, am not seduced by the allure of sleep and drag myself up, go to the kitchen to heat up some food. I return to my room, sit at my desk, open my computer, and begin to work. The day is not over yet, there is still much to be done.