Way back when I was first married, my ex and I impulsively decided to go ring shopping while driving past the maul (no typo, I call them mauls for they maul you with savings!).  We walked into the Kay Jewelers at Montgomery Maul (no longer there BTW) and spent a few minutes looking at rings.  When we decided we needed help, we were promptly and most decisively ignored by the staff.  As we were one of two couples in the place, they had to use some pretty strong jutsu to ignore us.  After many minutes of unsucessful attempts to get anyone’s attention, we left and headed to another store.  I can’t recall the name, but again, we were most verily ignored.  Brushed off if you will.

This was a clear case of ageism.

Normally, whenever we were treated poorly, I used to attribute it to racism.  We were a mixed couple, I’m Asian and she was a tall Caucasion blond.  But in this case, I suspect it had more to do with what we were wearing than our skin color.  When I go to the maul, I dress like a proper geek should.  Ultraman t-shirt, pants with zippers.  Clearly not someone who appears to have large amounts of cash.  But here’s the thing.  When a young couple walks into your jewelery store, chances are they’re there to purchase something.  They may not look like much, but it’s a good bet that they have money to spend.  It might not be for an engagement ring.  It could be for a necklace or some earings.  Either way, couples don’t window shop for jewelery.  You can’t drag a guy into a jewelery store unless he’s buying something.

I actually had a decent wad of cash to spend on an engagement ring.  Someone at that Kay Jewelers could have made a decent commission.  Instead, they earned nothing but my enmity and bad publicity because I talk shit about them every time a friend says they’re thinking about buying jewelery which is usually about the time they’ve saved huge cashola to spend on an engagement ring.  We took our business to Mervis who treated us like kings and sold us a higher quality diamond for less than we would have paid for Kay Jewelers.

Idiots.

I’d like to report that this sort of thing doesn’t happen to me now.  But when my current wife and I decided to go ring shopping, we were met with a few cold shoulders.  The fuck is wrong with these people?  By now, I would have thought that these old fucks running these stores would realize that geeks have geeky jobs which in turn hand out geeky fat paychecks.  We did find a place that treated us very well from our first step through the door and we bought my wife’s engagement ring and both our wedding bands from them.   And we’d buy more from them if Audrey actually wore jewelery.

So there you go.  When ring shopping, be wary of anti-geek shop owners.  Don’t give them your money.  They don’t deserve it.  No matter how fancy or upscale the store is, you deserve respect because dammit, you’re gonna buy something shiny and expensive!

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 9:25 am and is filed under geek love, Angry Zen Master. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.