SMALL PRINT:CANNY SHOP ASSISTANTS will spend the last hours of this Christmas season looking for panic-stricken men – and it is almost always men – without a clue what to get for their nearest and dearest and then make them pay handsomely for their seasonal slackness.
According to a survey of Christmas shopping types published by Business Intelligence and mystery-shopping company Retail Active yesterday, Last-Minute Man is most at risk of buying stupid, overpriced and unwanted gifts this year “Last-Minute Man is a salesperson’s dream: he’s cash rich and time poor,” said Retail Active’s managing director, Julian Chamberlain.
“He does his desperate shopping in the final hours of Christmas Eve and he ends up buying expensive and unwanted gifts.” The retailing consultant has been coaching staff on the jewellery counters of at least one major retail chain in Britain on how to spot him. “They have to look for a man looking through a wide variety of stock, not knowing what to buy and wearing a blank expression.”
If that sounds like you, the key is to look calm, no matter how stressed you are on the inside or else you’ll be taken for a mug and may even end up buying one.
Retailing consultant Eddie Shanahan spent many years working on shop floors in Ireland and says that Last-Minute Man was always easy to spot. He further sub-divides the genus into the feckless, the flathúlach and the flaky.
“There was always the guy who came in at the last minute and didn’t care too much about what he bought. His presents were as thoughtless as he was. Then you had the person who came in and asked to be shown the most expensive fragrance and just went with that.”
The third type of Last-Minute Man, Shanahan says, is the one who just hasn’t got his act together for whatever reason and comes in in a panic and flails all around him in search of the perfect present.
Shanahan says the trick to good gift buying – leaving aside the whole buy early and calmly notion which is beyond many of us – is to channel the wisdom of Santa and make a list – not a list of gifts but a list of gift-getters. “Buy the premium present first and always go shopping with an open mind, that way you will come across present options that may never have occurred to you.”
Open mind? That sounds suspiciously like blank mind, and isn’t that why most of us last-minute men have got into trouble in the first place?
