Want to buy also get scolding

This weekend has been furniture shopping time for us.

CA and I finally made two important decisions:

a. Beth needs a proper study desk.

She keeps falling off the little lime-coloured chair that she's had since she was a wee tot. You know, the plastic table-and-two-chairs combi they sell in the toy section of department stores. We keep forgetting how much older and bigger she is now.

b. We're ready to migrate from mattress-on-the-floor to a proper bed.

Mind you, the mattress-on-the-floor works very well for all of us. The kids sleep with us and no-bedframe means they can't fall off the bed in the middle of the night.

It's just that our pre-owned double mattress was giving me the most dreadful eczema flare-ups.

Bed bugs?

Who knows?

Finally found a $189 chocolate study desk for Beth @ IKEA.

Beth wanted the red-and-white, but it wasn't available. So...

The desk is compact, comes with book shelves and has a handy magnetic board that she can scribble important dates and stuff on.

Cool.

We made the trek more worthwhile by having (what else) Swedish meatballs for lunch.

Finding the bed was a bit harder.

It finally came down to Furniture Galore vs. Beds Australia.

FG is one of those stores that specialize in affordable furniture packages.

We had our eye on a chocolate QS bedframe that had in-built shelves that are handy for glasses and books.

CA thought it very old-fashioned (!!!) but I liked it for its utility.

FG was selling the bedframe, a matching five-drawer tallboy and a pair of bedside tables for $600.

A very good price.

Just to be sure, we thought we'd check out Beds Australia.

What an amazing store.

It's solely dedicated to bedroom furniture, so there's a lot more choice.

The stuff's all Australian-made, and you can see right away that the quality and workmanship are far superior to what you find in most stores.

The owner had also taken the trouble to do up every mock-up bedroom with identical coloured partitions.

Beautiful.

I spent a lot of time wandering around in a methodical manner, starting with the perimeter where all the "bedrooms" were and working my way in to the mattresses.

I had just started taking down price info of the bedframe and mattress of choice when the owner came up to us.

He was fairly bristling.

Next thing we knew, we were being accused of being spies from rival companies wanting to copy model numbers and prices so we could go away and import something identical at half the price and put yet another proudly Australian company out of business.

I have never been so offended in my life.

I could feel my cheeks flaming as the owner ranted away.

He even suggested we could leave his store right away if we were there on false pretences.

I offered to show him what I'd written down (the same sort of thing I write down when I'm at IKEA - you know, model number, price...), but he waved his hand dismissively.

We explained what we were there to buy and why I was taking notes (short memory mah!).

The whole situation was plainly ridiculous.

I've never heard of a shop owner trying to chase his prospective customer away, especially when he's been in business for just 3 months!

We could easily have walked out, but I detected an opportunity to turn the situation around.

I dug in my heels and refused to be intimidated.

A very tricky thing for someone like me.

I told the owner that surely he ought to have more confidence in his products. He was going into such detail about their Australian pedigree and the degree of craftsmanship involved, the difference between his beds and the imported ones etc.

And all the time I was thinking to myself, why don't you stress this as your selling point and use it to win customers, instead of berating people just because you suspect them of not being bona fide?

That's like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Tarring everyone with the same brush.

Letting a few black sheep spoil the market.

In being defensive and protective, he had become offensive.

This shop owner, despite claiming to be in the business for 30 years, has never learnt about How To Win Friends And Influence People.

What a turn-off.

There are so many business applications I can think of from this tale:
How to treat prospects
How not to treat prospects
How to handle people you suspect of trying to undermine your business
How to give your business an unbeatable edge by stressing your USP rather than price difference

The tale has a happy ending, however.

Because we knew exactly what we wanted, we were the last customers of the day and given the unusual circumstances, the owner offered to give us a very good discount.

The bedframe was $1295.
He offered $1050.
The divan was $895.
He took $200 off that because we were only wanting the top mattress, and reduced the price further to $390.
He waived the delivery and installation charges.
He offered to try and speed up the delivery of the bed, which normally takes 6 weeks to arrive.

We ended up paying $1440 on what would otherwise have cost $2200.

I love happy endings, don't you?