Renee's Story

Renee works in a downtown jewelry store. Common sense and prejudice would both lead one to believe that a jewelry store salesperson spends much of their workday talking to sheepish, slightly confused men. Among answers that need to be extracted from these out-of-their-element boyfriends, husbands, and, on a good day, husbands-to-be, is the issue of price: and what sort of price range did you have in mind?

“They will very often say something like - Oh, I was thinking only about a hundred dollars or so. And they always add, I’ve already bought a lot of other stuff but I figured I’d also buy a ring, so.”

“I bet that’s never true,” Renee adds. “They haven’t bought anything else. This is it. It’s just that they think a hundred bucks isn’t very much to spend on jewelry. But a hundred dollars is a lot. We have many pieces for well under that. If you were buying anything else as a birthday gift, a hundred would be a lot.”

A hundred dollars buys really nice shoes. The bookstore will send you home well loaded if you spend that much. For a hundred bucks, you could stay in a charming B&B, or have a fantastic meal. If you instead pay that much for jewelry, Renee won’t judge you, nor will most other sales folk; after all, it’s their store that sells this stuff. The market for all of it, from the cheapest to the priciest, is you and people not unlike you. 

Doesn’t something similar happen in slightly offbeat or fancy restaurants, where inexperienced diners skip the awesome-looking meals with hard-to-pronounce names, buy the second-least expensive wine (never the cheapest one, goodness no), and generally watch their every step for fear of getting this whole ritual wrong?

Also: fanciness and experience are relative. The first time I used a fast-food drive-through was two years ago, at the Burgerville down the street. I went to park first, and Christa insisted that we drive up instead - come on, it’s raining. No no, I’d like to go in. Seriously? Just drive up. Here, I delivered my sorry tale: I grew up in a time and place without drive-through restaurants. I had only seen them in movies. I didn’t know how they worked, honestly. You pull up to a thing and talk to a hissy box, then you go around the corner to the window? When do you pay? Where’s the menu? Do they take cards? I didn’t know, and I expected there to be a secret handshake, a code.

There is rarely a code, and when there is, honest workers probably sort of like taking a break from it. Renee would like it if every now and then a guy said, hey, I’d like to buy something for my lady, and I’m working with about a hundred bucks. This is important to me, so let’s find the best hundred-dollar ring, bracelet, tiara, or whatever you’ve got.

It’s good to have empathy, and to remember that most people are a lot more like you than they are different than you.