If you’re operating a shop, storefront, booth, kiosk or busking station, you’ll want to know what to do with those interminable waiting periods between customers, and there will be plenty of them, believe it.

Many retailers and service personnel lose a LOT of precious productivity, and when you own your own business and want to be your own boss — well, you’ll have a LOT of time on your hands.

If you’re ever in a department store where customers are not actually engaged in sales, you’ll see the salespeople adjusting things, dusting things, re-arranging things, pricing things — basically, doing something, anything, to appear busy.

It’s widely believed, and perhaps it’s true, that if customers see salespeople loafing about, they won’t buy a thing, which certainly matches my extensive experience in retail.

Heck-darn, when you’re talking Retail, you’re talking Planet Earth. Why, back home, we NEVER pay retail — nobody pays retail anywhere except here on Planet Earth.

Humans of Planet Earth are so ignorant, they call it “bartering”, not “bargaining”, when you make offers and counter-offers.

Bartering is where you trade a laying hen for a carpenter’s work fixing your wagon, and I don’t mean that figuratively at all. Continue reading →