Overzealous sales assistants (a rant)

Today I popped into my beloved Boots store in order to replace the burgundy mascara that I used up this morning. It’s a colour I wear fairly often so I don’t feel I’m being too naughty replacing it as I don’t own any others. Now not many brands do this shade of mascara so I bet you guess what well renowned hard sell brand I ended up at.

I want to preface this by saying I in no way blame the girl. Had we met under different circumstances I’m sure we’d have gotten on like a house on fire. These women are under insane pressure to drive sales and meet targets but the prescribed fashion in which some do it is bordering on bullying. “no thanks” I said when offered help. “I just want the mascara”. 15 minutes later my bewildered husband finds a quivering orange wreck pinned to the counter. As the fog of enthusiastically sprayed perfumed clears he sees that his wife, far from looking like she was born in the 80’s actually looks like she is in the 80’s.

Now I’m not a makeup artist. But I’m pretty damn sure that if your blush goes from your temple to your mouth and glows in the dark you’ve got too much on. Honestly my face looks like a tropical sunset with the hues of pink against the back drop of orange. Oh my friends Ronseal ain’t got nothing on these girls. It doesn’t matter what shade your skin might actually be if they had their way and army of orange faced clones would be walking the streets. I tried for a good 20 minutes to capture this on camera but my camera just can’t cope. Here is an image of Snooki to demonstrate the effect the foundation had on me. (I don’t own this image (thank God), google found it. If it’s yours ask and I’ll remove it)

The tactic is of course to put a whole face of makeup on you and then pressure you into buying every item used. And with the exception of the foundation everything she used is actually a product I would like to own (applied sparingly). But what did I buy? My mascara. Ok and some You Rebel ... and some Porefessional. You see I need these things for my holiday. But my point is I walked in just after pay day with a whole list of things I would have loved to have bought but much to her obvious disgust declined to buy anything else even though I’d said that I liked the blush colour etc. I was just so damn pissed off that everything I said was being ignored. Every time I said no she said ‘it will only take a minute’ before literally attacking my face with a brush. When she finally conceded that I wasn’t buying anything else she stopped talking to me all together and rushed me through the till whilst already eyeing up her next victim.

Will I be going into a counter in future? Hell no! It was a wholly unpleasant experience. I felt pressured and ignored at the same time. Maybe I’ll buy some of their products in future but I’d have to do it online which means I can’t swatch them so I may well end up not bothering. This means that the company has lost my business not because the products aren’t good, for the most part they are fab, but because buying from a counter again fills me with the kind of fear and loathing normally reserved for visits to the dentist. I left looking ridiculous and feeling like crap.

Let me know in the comments, have you had a bad makeup counter experience? What did you do to get them to back off and leave you to shop?! xx