A woman comes in with her son who is maybe twelve years old.
Customer: “Excuse me. I just want to check if something would be all right. My son is on the spectrum, you see, and he doesn’t take to change too well.”
Me: “I think I understand.”
Customer: “Our old sofa is falling apart, and we need to change it. I’ve put it off as long as possible, but I am letting him choose our new sofa. I know it takes a few weeks to order a sofa, so we have to do this now. He’s going to need to sit on every single seat on every single sofa in the store. Will that be okay?”
Me: “Of course! We want to make sure all our customers leave here happy with their purchase!”
So, the mother takes her son around the store, and he does as she said he would. He literally tries every single seat, and he even makes little notes in a notebook about which ones he prefers. We are a large store, and we have almost seventy sofas spread over two large floors, so this takes them over two hours.
I go over to them as they’re nearing the end of their quest, and I speak directly to the boy.
Me: “So, what are the top contenders?”
Boy: “I have taken notes on the top seven so far. I have them all written down in my book, but I won’t know for sure until I spend my Switch time on them.”
Me: “Switch time?”
Customer: “He needs to play his Switch, his uh… Nintendo, to know for sure. He plays for an hour a day, and he always plays in his favorite spot, but we don’t need to do that here. We’ll decide out of these seven he’s chosen and we can go from there.”
Me: *Quietly, away from her son* “Ma’am, would you like him to play his games on the couch so he knows for sure?”
Customer: “That’s very kind of you, but you don’t understand. He wouldn’t be testing it for five minutes or so. He has exactly one hour of screen time, so he would test it for the entire hour. We wouldn’t be able to do all that today, and I wouldn’t want to take up space in your store for my son to just play his game.”
Me: “Ma’am, he wouldn’t just be playing his game, though, would he? We’d be doing all we could to ensure our customer is happy with the sofa that they go home with. Now, we might not be able to spend seven hours here testing each one, but maybe he could use his notes to narrow it down to one or two?”
Customer: “Are you sure?”
Me: “Absolutely, ma’am.”
The mother relays the information to her son, who uses his extensive notes to narrow it down to two sofas. He then gets comfortable on one and starts playing on his Switch while the mother sits nearby and gets stuff done on her phone.
Near the end of this experiment, the store manager comes over to me and asks what’s going on, as they have been in the store for over five hours now and it looks like they’re just chilling on their devices. I explain, and the manager nods with approval and tells me to carry on.
An hour from closing time, the mother and the boy come up to me, and he reads from his notebook.
Boy: “I think we would like [Sofa Model] in [very precise configuration] in [specific upholstery], please.”
The mother nodded in agreement, and I got them started with ordering the sofa. The little boy left with his mother, talking excitedly about the new sofa, and the mother mouthed a huge “thank you” to me as they went.
That mother is so patient and understanding of her little boy, so the least I could do was offer the same patience and understanding for the few hours they were in the store.
This story is part of the Best-Feel-Good-Stories Of-2023 roundup!
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