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By Cathy Baker
Kenneth was at Bed & Bunk
by quarter to 10 Tuesday morning, but even so, he was the last salesman to
arrive at the showroom. Nijan and Leo had beat him in and that meant they
would get the first two ups. Should there be a third up, it would be Kenneth’s.
His wife Jodi found it incredible that some days in an 8-hour shift not even
three customers might come in. She would ask her husband why Bed & Bunk
always scheduled so many salespeople for a store with such light traffic,
and Kenneth would explain: franchise policy was never to risk having a customer
in the store without a salesperson ready to serve. Employees of Bed &
Bunk earned no salary and no benefits, only commission. Thus, from management
point of view, there was nothing to lose by flooding the floor. Jodi could
never quite believe the callousness of this business model, which is why she
would ask her husband the same question each time he came home without a single
up.
Nijan was already on the phone
as Kenneth put his briefcase down next to one of the two desks in the rear,
near the inexpensive mattresses. Most probably, Nijan was working a mortgage
or a real estate deal. Nijan had his fingers in many pies. He was what Jodi
liked to call an operator. Kenneth suspected that Nijan worked at Bed &
Bunk not so much for the mattress commission than as for a place to serve
as an office other than his own kitchen table.
Leo was not at all like Nijan.
Perhaps he once had been, but no longer. He was lying on a mattress, face
up, eyes closed, his gray hair fanned around his head like a halo, his hands
folded on his chest as they would be in his casket. Yet he was still alive.
His feet were flat on the floor so that he could pull himself up the moment
the front door opened to the public at 10.
Poor, tired out Leo. He had
worked every show on the sales circuit: shoes, cars, photocopiers, frozen
foods, vacation timeshares. He was old school. Very old school. Sometimes
he even wore white shoes. Kenneth suspected that the mattress market was
the last stop for Leo, on the downward slide from his peak. This thought
made Kenneth uncomfortable about the trajectory of his own career. He was
39 and could not imagine his future. He supposed it possible that Bed &
Bunk would be the pinnacle.
The first up arrived almost immediately.
She was a sharp-nosed woman in a tent-like, gray raincoat, and she entered
the store at 10:15. She had an ascetic look about her, as though she were
accustomed to sleeping on nails. After almost an hour of effort, Nijan landed
her on the second-least-expensive twin mattress in the store. No box spring.
At 11 o’clock Kenneth left the
store for 10 minutes. He was very hungry, so leaving was a risk he was willing
to take. There was little chance that two more ups would come through in
the little time it took to run across the street for fast food. When he returned
to the store, it was empty. He found Nijan and Leo sitting on the delivery
bay out back, gazing out at the alley, trading stories about the golden age
of mattress sales before there were a thousand franchises.
At noon, to circulate his blood,
Kenneth walked around the showroom. He examined for the 100th time the displays
of Bed & Bunk Promises. The large photo of a man and a woman lying in
chaste, adjacent rest: We’ll tuck you in to a good night’s sleep!
The close-up of a woman’s head resting on a pillow, eyes closed, mouth curved
into an unconscious little smile: Your sleep satisfaction six months guaranteed!
The poster of pajama-clad parents looking down at their sleeping child: Nighttime
will become your favorite time of day!
In his perambulation Kenneth
came across Leo in the narrow space between the back wall and a mattress.
The old man was kneeling on the floor with his head resting on the mattress,
his cheek against the soft surface, his lips pursed as if in a kiss, his hands
dangling down at his side. He was sound asleep.
Between 1 and 2 o’clock, time
was heavy. No customer opened the door to the fresh air outside. Carbon
dioxide mounted inside. For Kenneth the hardest part of selling beds was
staring at a sea of them, wanting to lie down if just for a moment, having
to deny himself over and over again.
At 2:30 Leo got his up. It was
another woman, this one looking for a waterproof mattress pad. Bed &
Bunk does not sell mattress pads. The store’s name was a problem. Customers
tended to confuse it for a bedding store.
No, she was not interested in
a mattress today, but thank you. She would take Leo’s card.
“You missed an opportunity there,
my friend,” Nijan said to Leo after the customer had left. His voice had
a tonal roll like the waves of an urgent ocean.
Leo’s voice by contrast was soft,
mocking, bitter. “There was no sale to be had there, young man.”
“The woman has a soiled mattress,
that is the clue you missed. You missed the opportunity to promote sanitation,
cleanliness, a fresh start. You should not have let her out of the store.
Everyone needs a new mattress. If you do not believe that, my friend, you
should not be in this business.”
“Go stuff yourself,” said Leo.
At 4:00 Kenneth’s wife came in
with their two daughters. It lifted his heart to have a little crowd of people
in the store, particularly when it included the children he loved so much
and the wife whose mere presence was enough. Jodi set the infant Betty down
on her back in the middle of a bed. She took off the shoes of Bonnie, the
toddler, and set her onto the highest bed in the store, a gigantic king-size
pillow top, the Z-Z Dream, the top-of-the-line model in a brass stand near
the front windows. Bonnie jumped gleefully, bounce bounce bounce.
She instructed her father to lift her over to another bed to bounce some more.
She leapt from bed to bed across the showroom with unbounded energy.
“My daddy has the best job!”
At 4:30 they left and the store
was again empty except for the three salesmen.
At 5:00 Kenneth’s up entered
the store. He was a middle-aged man with a briefcase in one hand and a plastic
bag from the video store in the other.
Kenneth allowed the customer
a few minutes to look around unmolested. Then he approached. He put on his
melodic greeting voice, the one that Jodi said reminded her of the trash can
that their daughter Bonnie liked so much, the trash can at the local park
that was decorated to look like a pig and that, when its door was opened to
insert garbage, would sing through some hidden speaker, thank you! thank
you! oink oink oink!
In this voice Kenneth said, “Hello!
What great things are happening to you today?”
Kenneth immediately thought,
what a stupid thing to say. Yet this was how Bed & Bunk trained its salespeople
to greet customers. These were “winning words,” the trainer had said. Even
so, it was a stupid sentence.
Yet the winning words evoked
a response, an opening. “Nothing,” the customer said. “Nothing great has
happened to me today.”
“Here comes the good news, then!
We have several mattresses on special discount.”
“I’m just browsing.”
Kenneth knew that people tended
not to enter mattress stores to browse. Such showrooms did not have browsable
wares compared to, say, consignment stores or houseware departments. Out
loud he said, again in his amiable pig voice, “I’m here to help you, sir,
when you’re ready.”
The man wandered in a disorganized
pattern amongst the mattresses. Kenneth retreated to a desk in the rear.
He pretended to do paperwork. Actually, he worked on the math puzzle from
the preceding day’s newspaper while keeping a furtive eye on his up.
The man stopped before the Z-Z
Dream. He pushed down on the mattress with his hand, sat on it, twisted around
to look at it, checked the price tag hanging off the side.
Kenneth sauntered casually over
toward the Z-Z Dream. He straightened a signboard or two along the way as
though that were his purpose.
“I see you have good taste —
or should I say, a good sense of touch.” He chuckled, to indicate that this
was a joke. “Isn’t that mattress extremely comfortable?”
The customer frowned. “Mattresses
are so high off the ground nowadays.”
“How old is the mattress you
have?”
“Don’t know. Sixteen, seventeen
years? It sags in the middle. My wife and I roll into each other.”
“A bed is more than a comfortable
night’s sleep. It’s an investment in your daytime productivity.” Kenneth
had such lines memorized.
“It’s a lot of money.”
“Hardly more than a quarter a
day, amortized over its lifetime.”
The customer asked Kenneth the
typical questions about warranties, free delivery, removal of the despised
old mattress. Kenneth answered the questions and then walked back to his
desk. Customers need space to think.
After a few moments, the man
approached the rear. Kenneth pretended to be too engrossed in paperwork to
notice.
“Excuse me.”
“Oh! Yes, sir?”
“How do I know if I want a hard
or a soft mattress?”
“Good question. Intelligent
question, sir. Come over here.”
Jodi, who, when Kenneth came
home at night from Bed & Bunk, liked to hear his play-by-plays, had nicknamed
this stage of the game “the Goldilocks test.” Along the side wall of the
floor stood three mattresses in a row: one soft, one hard, one medium. Customers
would be instructed to lie down fully on each one. According to Bed &
Bunk sales training, the primary purpose of this procedure was to give customers
a sense of various mattress densities. It was Jodi’s opinion that this also
served to make customers feel foolish and vulnerable, as though they have
made use of property that wasn’t theirs and owed the store something.
Kenneth’s customer decided he
preferred the medium-density mattress. “More or less. I think.”
Kenneth led him over to a model
in the middle of the Bed & Bunk price range. He would move the customer
up or down from there, depending on which way he looked. As the man sat on
the medium-density, middle-model mattress, he looked toward the front of the
store. This meant he was willing to spend more, according to Kenneth’s compass.
With one or two stops along the
way, Kenneth was able to maneuver the man all the way back to the Z-Z Dream.
“You can really feel the difference, can’t you?” The man sat on the Z-Z Dream,
then tried other beds, sitting down on them, bouncing his backside on them,
patting them, looking hard at them, frowning. It was always the same.
They began to discuss price.
“Today you save $200 off the
Z-Z Dream. That’s a handsome deal. This particular manufacturer rarely reduces
its prices.”
The man had moved of his own
accord back to the Z-Z Dream. In a capricious and unexpected motion, he laid
back on it. He sighed, deeply. Kenneth sensed that he was almost ready to
close. But instead the customer balked. He sat up suddenly, very straight.
“I can’t make this purchase without
checking with my wife.”
“What’s to check about? You
need a mattress, I have a mattress. She’ll be delighted that you made this
decision.”
“I dunno. She loves to shop.
Maybe I should bring her in.”
“If we write up the sale now,
you can be getting a good night’s sleep as soon as tomorrow night. It’ll
be a second honeymoon. Your wife would like that, wouldn’t she?”
The man started to walk toward
the door. “Thanks all the same. I have to think about it.”
“Tell you what. You say yes
right now and I can ask my manager to knock another $100 off the price.”
There was no manager in the store. There was a district manager, available
by telephone, but Kenneth would not be calling him. Kenneth was free to take
$100 off — free to reduce his own commission.
The man hesitated.
Kenneth continued. “It’s a tedious
thing, sir, to buy a mattress. It’s not like buying a car. There’s no sense
in drawing this out. How about we make a deal?”
The man hesitated.
Kenneth stepped back. Sales
was a game of subtle moves. Kenneth sensed that this customer needed more
line before being reeled in.
He turned toward the back of
the store to adjust a mattress that was not square on its box spring. Glancing
up, he saw Nijan looking daggers at him. Nijan wanted him to trade off the
customer. He wanted Kenneth to say to the customer, “I’d like you to talk
to my manager,” and turn him over to Nijan (who of course was not the manager)
and let him try to close. Nijan wanted to save the deal, split the commission.
Bed & Bunk policy used to require such trade-offs when dealing with reluctant
customers; recently, however, management had issued new guidelines. The trade-off
was now optional.
Kenneth opted not to trade off
to Nijan. Split deals usually split in Nijan’s favor or became his deals
outright. He was a very insistent man and he could argue for hours over small
amounts. His insistence was what made him a somewhat successful salesman.
He could badger people into a mattress purchase. He was what Kenneth called
a bone-crusher. Jodi called him slimy.
Kenneth looked back at his customer.
The man was gazing at some undefined point across the room, as though making
calculations. When the silence became unbearable, Kenneth broke in.
“What will it take me to sell
you a mattress today?”
The customer mugged at Kenneth,
as though admitting a weakness.
“To tell you the truth, I like
that Z-Z Dream. I like it a lot. I am so damned sick of waking up with a
crick in my back. I just don’t want to pay that much money.”
Kenneth laughed lightly. “We
have a lot of options.” He spoke rapidly about the no-money-down plan, the
no-payments-for-three-months plan, the Bed & Bunk credit card extra discount
plan. But none seemed to clinch. The man stood there as if caught in drying
cement.
“Tell you what. Let’s take another
look at this mattress over here. It’s essentially the same as the Z-Z Dream,
but priced competitively. The manufacturer wants to improve market share,
so you’d be getting a real value.”
Thus continued the sale for another
15 minutes.
Suddenly the man looked at his
watch. “Shoot! I gotta go.” He picked up the briefcase and video bag that
he had set on the floor.
Kenneth recognized this as a
desperate, make-or-break moment. Bed & Bunk had specific instructions
for just this situation: “Go for the sale, or go for the kill.” That is,
if customers could not be persuaded to purchase from Bed & Bunk, make
the experience so unpleasant that they would not buy a mattress from any
store for another ten years.
Against his better judgment,
Kenneth followed company procedure.
“Tell me, sir: in your home,
you can’t make the decisions?”
The customer looked up at Kenneth,
startled.
“Your wife could waltz in here
and pick out whatever mattress she chooses, but you can’t. Why is that?”
The man continued to stare at
Kenneth and began to turn red in the face.
Kenneth turned his back on his
up and walked toward one of the desks. It was out of his hands, he told himself.
Either the customer would decide to show his manhood by walking out or salvage
his manhood by demanding a better price. Kenneth had no fear that the insult
would result in combat. The showroom of Bed & Bunk was too antiseptic,
too fluorescently lighted, for a fistfight.
He reached the desk and paused
without sitting. He listened carefully to detect the actions of his customer.
If this sale did not go through, he would have nothing to show for today,
nothing for this week, nothing for this month.
The intense space of those seconds
was long enough for Kenneth to once again consider his own worthlessness.
Jodi called sales “the last refuge of the dispossessed.” She was right on
this. High school or college degree: unnecessary. Valid Social Security
number: optional. Criminal record: occasionally problematic, never insurmountable.
Can you move mattresses— or metal or mortgages or you-name-the-product?
That was what mattered. And he couldn’t do it; at least, not today, not this
week, not this month. In this moment he hated sales.
He wished hard. To sell the
Z-Z Dream mattress and box spring, even at $300 below retail, would mean $500
commission. He could feel the sweat accumulate on his brow. Do the deal!
How to do the deal!
More than anything, Kenneth did
not want to hear Nijan explaining that he had missed his opportunity, my friend.
Kenneth did not hear his customer
move. Was he still standing there? Was he crushed, helpless, waiting? Kenneth
had a sudden wave of sympathy for his mark. What has it come to, he thought,
when you are willing to punch another man down for a measly $500 commission?
He looked up at Nijan, who sat
on the other side of the next desk. He was filing his nails and sneering.
Kenneth glanced at Leo, who had propped himself up in the doorway to the back
storage room and looked despondent.
Nijan was the devil. Leo had
sold his soul to the devil, long ago. To hell with the devil!
Kenneth turned back toward his
customer. He extended his arms away from his side, palms forward. It was
a gesture equivalent to a dog rolling over on its back, exposing its neck,
surrendering.
“I didn’t mean that the way it
sounded.” Again the pig voice. It was the voice he used when coaxing his
daughter Bonnie into her bath, but not the voice he used when talking with
his wife Jodi late at night, on their mattress, a better-quality model purchased
wholesale, the single perquisite so far from employment at Bed & Bunk.
“What I mean is, here’s the great
thing that could happen to you today. You could have a new bed, the Z-Z Dream,
for $400 below the retail price. A great deal for a great bed. Just say
yes, what do you say?”
That night, after dinner and
bath time and bedtime stories for the girls and the play-by-play for Jodi,
Kenneth lay on his bed. He luxuriated in his state of semi-consciousness,
with the baby in the crook of one arm and Bonnie asleep on top of him. Tomorrow,
Wednesday, was his day off. Joy!
“We went to the library after
we saw you today,” Jodi said from the other side of the mattress. “I picked
up a brochure about the fire department. I think you should be a paramedic.”
Kenneth did not answer.
“Really, you’d be great at it.
You’re so good in a crisis. You’re a steady Eddy.”
Kenneth did not answer.
“Are you awake? Why don’t you
say something? You’re always like this. Ever since you started selling mattresses,
all you ever want to do is sleep.”
Jodi leaned over the children,
put her mouth on Kenneth’s ear, and kissed it.
“Maybe you should sell motorcycles.
Or exercise bikes. Or porn videos.”
He smiled, eyes closed.
“The thing is,” Jodi continued,
“with me freelance and you commission, it’s crazy. One of us needs to be
getting a salary.”
He roused himself to mumble a
reply. “Why don’t you get the salaried job then?”
“Because I’m not the one who’s
miserable.”
On Thursday, Kenneth arrived
at Bed & Bunk at twenty to 10, but Nijan was already there. He looked
up from the desk where he sat. “Your customer called, ” Nijan said. This
was not good. Customers do not call after completing a purchase to say they
appreciated being tucked in to a good night’s sleep or that nighttime had
become their favorite time of day.
When Kenneth returned the customer’s
call, he had difficulty at first deciphering what the man was saying because
he spoke so rapidly. Kenneth could make out the angry tone and certain phrases
such as “imbecile delivery jerk” and “can’t even speak English.” Kenneth
persuaded the man to repeat himself. Apparently the delivery truck had brought
out the wrong mattress, the Nite-Quiet Ultra, not the Z-Z Dream.
The commission on the Nite-Quiet
Ultra was half that on the Z-Z Dream.
Apparently the delivery driver
had suggested, no insisted, that the customer give the Nite-Quiet Ultra a
try. “Hell, maybe you like it,” he had said, as though he were a salesman.
He and the customer had gotten
into an argument, which the customer had lost. The customer had refused to
sleep on the Nite-Quiet Ultra, which with its box spring was up in his bedroom
where it was leaning against a wall, crowding him, giving him nightmares while
he spent another night on his droopy mattress next to his wife who most certainly
was not behaving as though they were on a second honeymoon.
“My goal is your complete satisfaction,
sir. I will make this right, sir. I’ll make a call and get right back to
you. My complete apologies for this unfortunate mix-up, sir.”
Kenneth’s conversation with his
district manager was no more pleasant than the one with the customer.
“Well, Kenny, did you screw up
the order sheet?”
“I did not.”
“You sure?”
“I’m looking at my copy right
here. You can’t mistake Z-Z for an N-Q. Besides, the order number’s correct
for the Z-Z.”
“You can’t talk the customer
into keeping it? That would save a lot of trouble.”
“What about the Bed & Bunk
motto?” asked Kenneth. “‘Satisfied customers sleep best’?”
“After a week he’ll forget he
hadn’t really wanted the N-Q. He’ll be fine.”
“I’m not going to ask him to
keep it. The Z-Z is the better mattress and he knows that and he wants it.”
“Get him to come in and fill
out the exchange paperwork, then.”
“I explained to you. This is
not an exchange.”
It took another 10 minutes with
the district manager, then several calls with the customer and the warehouse
that scheduled deliveries, to set matters right.
On Friday morning at 10:00, Kenneth
called his customer to confirm that the Z-Z had arrived and that both the
N-Q and the old mattress had been taken away. At 10:15, when Nijan was in
the restroom, Kenneth told Leo that he was leaving and would not be back.
“You can have my up.”
On the fifteenth of the next
month, when his final commission check from Bed & Bunk arrived in the
mail, Kenneth was surprised to see he’d been paid on both the Z-Z and the
N-Q. In all his years in commission sales, he had never seen a mistake in
his favor. Kenneth was good at math, and he quickly calculated that the extra
$200 amounted to a bonus of 13 cents per hour when divided by the 1,500 hours
he had dedicated to Bed & Bunk.
After some thought, he decided
not to mention this to Jodi. She had an unrealistic, rigid sense of right
and wrong. She did not even cheat at board games. She would not see the
justice in this.
Cathy Baker is a science writer
from Bethesda.
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