|
Some things need to change. I got off the MRT in Cubao and walked
towards LRT2 to get to Sta. Mesa. I had to traverse Farmers Market,
the side of Araneta Coliseum and Gateway Mall. As a curiosity, I
entered Fairmart and walked through one straight lane from one
entrance to the exit. When I exited, the guard rudely stopped me,
grabbed my handbag, asked me to open it and checked its contents
very meticulously. I asked, “Why are you doing that?” I
yanked my bag out of his dirty (really dirty, you should have seen
his fingernails) hands. He simply shrugged and said, “Company
policy.”
I felt humiliated, insulted and violated. The
past eight months, I’ve gone in and out of shops, big and small,
around Macau, Singapore, Taipei, South Africa, the US, Canada,
Boracay, Cebu, Divisoria, Greenhills, Glorietta, Shangri-la Plaza,
Tiendesitas, SM and Tri-Noma. None of them ever harassed me by
searching my purse on my way out. I understand and willingly
subject my bag to a search when I am entering a building or a shop. But
at exit point?
One time at Ross in California, the alarm
sounded as my friend and I were leaving the store. Immediately, a
guard was there beside us, asked us to step aside and give him our
shopping bags. He passed them three times through the door
anti-theft contraption that continued to sound the alarm. He very
politely asked us to follow him to a nearby table and asked us to
open our bags. He went through the contents with a stick,
didn’t see anything anomalous and apologized profusely for the
inconvenience. As we were going out, the alarm again sounded, we
looked at him and he was just smiling. And we just shrugged our
shoulders. Take note that he never asked to look into our
personal purses.
What’s with Fairmart? I didn’t know if they
also checked the very few shoppers who entered their store. I
never looked back and I will never go there again.
In his book, BLINK, this is what Malcolm
Gladwell call “thin-slicing or the ability of our unconscious to
find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices
of experience.” Gladwell asks, “How is it possible to gather the
necessary information for a sophisticated judgment in such a short
time?
But that guard at Fairmart was not even
thinking. I saw him as I entered the store, which was not far from
where he was. He was talking animatedly with a woman who didn’t
look like an employee. He never once took his eyes off her even
when he accosted me. He never looked at me even for a second.
Even Gladwell could not, maybe, explain that.
Some company policy and a subservient security guard—a fatal
combination for business.
Gladwell wrote about Amadou Diallo who lived in
the Soundview neighborhood of the South Bronx, New York City. Diallo,
22, was from Guinea and sold videotapes, socks and gloves from the
sidewalk. He was short, unassuming and had a stutter.
On the night of February 3, 1999, Diallo was
downstairs standing at the top of the steps of his apartment
building and taking in the night. A group of plainclothes
police officers (Ken Boss, Sean Carroll, Edward McMellom and Richard
Murphy) in an unmarked car saw him and asked, “Can we have a
word?”
Diallo paused and ran into the vestibule. The
policemen gave chase and told him to, “Get your hands out of your
pockets.” Diallo started to remove a black object from his right
side. And Caroll yelled out, “Gun! He’s got a gun!”
All four policemen fired a total of 25 shots at
Diallo. Then there was silence. Guns drawn, the policemen
climbed the stairs and approached Diallo. Boss said, “Where
was the fucking gun?” Where there should have been a gun, there
was a wallet. Carroll sat down on the steps, next to Diallo’s
bullet-ridden body, and started to cry. Boss was so distraught
he could not speak.
That Fairmart guard fired his gun at me, so to
speak, without thinking and killed the prospect of me becoming a
customer of Fairmart.
___
www.learningandinnovation.com, innovationcamp@yahoo.com
|
