Philip was spending the weekend snowboarding with friends. Amelia was on her annual girls’ weekend away. Both were tucked away in a mountain community at least four hours from home. Amelia was with about five friends in a townhouse. Philip was with about thirty-five friends in a lodge. Chloe and I had an entire weekend to do “daddy and daughter” things all by ourselves. We ate the food the other two never wanted to eat. We watched a movie that appealed to us alone. I took her to her basketball game and watched her score three points between a foul shot and a regular basket. But my favorite shared activity of the weekend was shopping together in a girls’ beauty shop that just opened in town.
The store was stationed right next to one of the two pharmacies in Hermes. While Chloe grabbed a shiny metallic basket to shop in earnest, I engaged the store manager on her company’s business plan. The beauty store was actually owned by the pharmacy’s parent company. The idea was to expand the pharmacy’s sale of beauty products by winning business away from the department stores in the mall. The inventory was more high-end than what was normally found in a pharmacy. Additionally, the beauty store had dedicated staff. That day the store manager had one sales assistant. Unlike their department store counterparts, they were not wearing lab coats. Instead they were dressed and made up as if they knew what they were doing by experience, not just training.
While I was asking the store manager about daily sales volume during their first quarter of business, Chloe came by to show me her likely purchase which was a $16.99 twist out container of lipstick. But Chloe called it lip gloss. “You can get the lip gloss if you want, Chloe. But that will probably be all you can get, since you just have twenty dollars.”
Chloe skipped away happy she could get the lipstick. “I’m pretty sure this is what I want to get,” she said with giddy eagerness. “But I want to keep looking around.” Chloe scoured the store. She spent a long time looking at the nail polish. But she also looked at eye shadow, the rest of the lipstick offerings, foundations, powders, moisturizers and everything else that lined the store’s shelves. While the store manager was describing to me the growing interest the store had from middle school aged girls, Chloe came over to ask, “What is mascara?”
After about twenty minutes in the store with no other customers. I figured I owed the store manager an opportunity to sell me something. “I’d like to get some perfume for my wife as a Valentine’s Day gift,” I said. “Can you recommend a few choices?” The store manager brought me over and gave me her sales presentation. From my MBA perspective, there was not much depth to the sales presentation. She simply began straying pinky-length strips of hard paper sticks from the test bottles and asked me my opinion. After the first three, I suggested I narrow my choices down to no more than two and test them out of each of Chloe’s wrists.
After smelling about eleven different perfumes, Chloe came by again having completed her self-guided tour of the store’s entire inventory. She still wanted to purchase the $16.99 lipstick and I told her she could buy it when we leave. Then I recruited her to be the true tester for the perfumes I was considering for Amelia. Chloe was immediately excited by the idea. She had looked at the perfume containers, but hadn’t smelled them at all. Suddenly there were eleven little scent sticks for her to inspect with her own olfactory senses. Trying on multiple perfumes also gave me the perfect platform to ensure Chloe took the scheduled shower I promised Amelia I would enforce.
With Chloe and I as the only customers in the store, the sales manager and her assistant indulged Chloe with their attention. They suggested five sprays rather than two: One at each elbow, one at the base of each hand, and one on the back of the neck. The first three were my top choices from the eleven original sprays. Then based on my feedback, they suggested two more. The final spray to the back of Chloe’s neck carried the day.
We all went to the check-out counter satisfied. Chloe purchased the most expensive container of makeup she’d ever owned. I had formulated an MBA case study if I ever needed one. Amelia had one of the nicest Valentine’s gifts I had ever given her on its way. And the staff at the beauty store had a nice sale of around six percent of their daily quota added to that day’s volume. The purchase came with a few free promotional giveaways for Chloe which topped it all off.
We put our bags in the car and indulged in one last daddy-daughter ritual. We walked into our favorite local coffee shop. I ordered black coffee. Chloe ordered a buttered croissant and a hot chocolate. We sat together for fifteen minutes reviewing our shopping trip to the beauty store. It was a fun trip and a fun weekend for both of us.
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