having worked for a gunshop on weekends the last year, i have a new appreciation for the fortitude it takes to be respectful and polite to customers.
not all customers of course, i'd say a little more than half are really great people. but there are a lot who just don't get it. sometimes its not their fault, they get bad information from their buddies or gunrags or the internet, and then come in and think they know what they are talking about.
for example, this one guy who i knew way back when comes in one day, and wants to order up a .375h&h ultra mag. he wants to hunt moose or other big stuff. never hunted before. read a magazine about it, and his friends swore up and down that this gun is what he needs. four of us try to talk some reason into his head. explain how he's only going to squeeze marginal performance out of the ultra mag, and dish out a lot more punishment in forms of recoil. nope, he won't be swayed. alright. we'll order him a remington, cost him about $800. oooooohhh, thats a little high. he wants to pay $600 to maybe $700, and that includes scope. but wait, we tell him he's really going to want that ultra mag to have a brake on it. theres another $250 or whatever. now he's gotta think about it.
then he remembers he wanted to trade in a shotgun towards his hunting rifle. comes back from the car with a mossberg marine. good shape, since he's a friend of mine, the manager says 'i can give you $200 for it in trade in'. well someone else offered him $450 for it. told him to go track down that sucker and get that $450 for it!
another customer comes in, wants to look at a semi-auto .308 with a 26" barrel. gee, theres not a lot of those around. at the moment didnt even have a semi-auto .308; suggested the m1a or a JLD. turns out he wants to hunt with it. okay. 'how far do you think your average shot is going to be?'
"ohh 800 to 1000 yards". hmmmm, well dontcha think something like a .338 might be a bit better at those distances, especially on caribou? a little more 'ooomph'. guy didnt know what he wanted. oh yeah, and his budget was $1500.
garage gunsmiths, you gotta love when they come in with their 'custom' guns and want to sell them to you. 'i got about three grand in that there 30'06, i'd like to get ohh, at least $2,800 for it.
well sir, you have multiple holes in the action from your attempts to drill/tap it yourself, looks like you took an acetylene torch to the bolt handle, your stock that you hand checkered isnt mounted correctly, which might explain the use of the oversized screws under the triggerguard, and theres more rust/pitting than blue. and because it was all your work done on it, i can't sell this to a customer because i don't know that you did the work 100%. so i'll give you $100 because all i'm going to do is take it apart and sell the individual parts on ebay, and maybe try to salvage the action for a custom job that actually will be worth something.
the 'thrifty' customers are also a pain. guy walks in, its christmas eve, or day before, i cant remember. we were just closing up, lights were turned off, but hey, he wants to take a look around, so we turn everything back on. guy likes the trijicon ta31-rco. msrp is $1400, normally we have it for well, lets just say, considerably less than msrp, and have even been more generous as to put a $1050 price tag on it for x-mas shoppers. manager goes out of his way, says '$1,000, shall we wrap that up for you?'
guy sneers 'i can get it online for $965., can you match that?'
so when you walk into a gunshop, and you see the employee there with a scowl on his face, consider that the person who just walked out of the store was one of the guys i described above. we do our best, we try to answer your questions, try to greet you as you enter, offer to show you guns off the rack or in the display case. we tell you when we can get you a better deal than the shop up the street. we explain why sometimes we can't compete. occasionally we tell you 'go buy it from sportsmans, i'd rather see you get a gun and pay less than what you would get it from us for. we tell you when the custom work you want us to do to a 40 yr old rifle will destroy its value, and will cost more than buying something newer.
what more can you ask for?
