The Baboon Congress

Moving the Monkey Merchandise

75 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Linda in St. Paul (West Side).

Working Valentine’s Day at a florist shop is one of those things that sounds more appealing in theory than it is in actual fact; like, I suppose, making pronto pups at the State Fair, or working the assembly line in the chocolate factory (just ask Lucy and Ethel about that one).

But into every working life a little novelty must fall from time to time, and this year mine was in the lanky form of a sock monkey.

In the days leading up to the Big Day, it’s call after call for basically the same thing:

dozen red roses with babies’ breath – card:love, John;
dozen red roses with babies’ breath – card: love, Tom.

So I was delighted to get a call from a father ordering flowers for his daughter at her dorm.

“Got any stuffed animals?” he asked.

The shop has a shelf of stuffed toys, mostly teddy bears and puppy dogs, with a few unusual things thrown in. In recent months there had been three monkeys on the shelf – two sock monkeys and a rather wild-looking simian with blue fur, possibly a distant cousin of Cookie Monster. I had been dying to sell one of those monkeys since before Christmas, without success. Probably just my overactive imagination, but I thought the monkeys’ expressions grew a little more downcast with each day that passed and left them still languishing on the shelf. So I jumped on my chance.

The customer, having let himself be talked into spending $20 on the monkey, didn’t have a lot of budget left to spend on the flowers, so I suggested one of the cheapest options the shop offers: a bud vase with two gerber daisies.

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You understand, I don’t arrange flowers professionally, myself. The shop has two tiers of designers. The elite group, the artistes, work in the back room so they can spend less time dealing with customers and concentrate on executing their artistic vision. The others work at the counter ringing up purchases and managing smaller orders, like flowers in bud vases. They have smaller paychecks, but creative souls.

Pat was the designer in whose capable hands I put the sock monkey and the accompanying order. In minutes, the brilliant orange gerbers, greens and ribbon adorned a red bubble vase, with Mr. Sock Monkey on board – IMHO, the single most charming thing that left the shop that day.

The other worker bees at the counter gathered around Pat to admire it, so she fetched the other two monkeys off the toy shelf and made two similar arrangements to put in the display cooler in the store, just to shake things up a little. It made me smile to see the monkeys gazing placidly out the cooler window from their perches among all those oh-so-predictable roses. Perhaps there were other smiles, too.

By closing time, all the monkeys had sold.

What’s the best sales idea you’ve had?

75 thoughts on “Moving the Monkey Merchandise”

  1. Trust your good heart, Linda, to find meaningful work for those deserving monkeys.

    Made me smile on what is looking to be a long, grey day.

    Not sure I have had a good sales idea ever, let alone a best one. I prefer being an artiste in the back room 🙂

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  4. Fun, Linda! Bookstores have been my retail experience, and one thing I’ve done was to rearrange the displays to be more visually lovely… I still find myself, if I see a stack of books leaning over on some store’s shelf, putting them upright with a “face-out” so they stay put. Will think more on this.

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    1. Arranging, how I love to arrange….

      If I ever have to work a table of something for sale (say, a bake sale), I do love to arrange it so everything looks as good as it can, and put something we have a lot of toward the more visible spot.

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  5. Good morning. Good work on finding homes for those sock monkeys, Linda. I have had a few sales ideas from time to time that I thought were good. I’m afraid that I was the only one who thought they were good ideas. When I did crop consulting I kept my eye open for fields that were infested with a nematode disease. I thought farmers would be glad to pay me for telling them about this problem. One farmer did go with me to see the problem. When I asked him to pay me a very small fee for showing him the problem he acted as though I was some kind of crook.

    An idea that worked out slightly better was my attempt to encourage my daughter to supply a local second hand store with flowers to sell to their customers. A few bunches of flowers from our flower bed were sold at that store. My daughter only took those flowers to that shop to please me and found a way to get out of that sales effort very soon after it started.

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  6. Fun post, Linda. Nice job on finding new homes for those sock monkeys.

    My career in sales is pretty much limited to my four month stint at W.T. Grant in Riverhead, NY. My everyday assignment was in the housewares department which, in addition to pots and pans and sundry household items, included an odd assortment of gift items, some of which had been gathering dust for quite some time. I recall in particular, two rather large, heavy glass fish, balanced on their tails and pectoral fins with their mouths gaping open at the top. I can only guess at what their intended use was, but decided it was time to display them prominently. I “borrowed” a couple of bags of colorful aquarium gravel from the neighboring pet department, and a handful of silk flowers from the adjacent gift wrapping department. With the gravel in the bottom of the fish, I arranged the colorful flowers sticking out of the fishes’ mouths, and placed both of them on an endcap display, and would you believe it? both were sold by the end of the day. Just goes to show you, there’s no accounting for taste. My boss was ecstatic; those fish had been around for over a year, and she had all but given up hope of ever selling them.

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    1. PJ, here’s an idea related to making sales. Perhaps you could team up with Linda and do consulting with stores on selling items that have not been moving off their shelves. Isn’t that a great idea?

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    2. Your sales feat was earned more honestly than mine, PJ – you not only had the idea, but executed it yourself, while I co-opted someone else’s talent to execute my idea.

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  7. Not so much the idea, but probably the best sale I’ve had was getting rid of an old upright for $400 at our yard sale when we were leaving Winona.

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  8. Having also worked at a floral shop, I have put Husband on strict orders to never buy me roses for Valentine’s Day. Or, if he must, not red roses. Feh. I would love gerbera daisies for Valentine’s Day – in fact I think they were in last year’s bouquet.

    I have a sales pitch in right now to by boss’ boss’ boss’ boss (the head honcho for our part of the vast enterprise). It’s not a huge thing, but given all the belt tightening, getting a trainer/coach in for the day for 20 people is something that requires a few approvals. Rather than bows or “borrowed” aquarium gravel, I have embellished by pitch with survey data and estimated cost savings. I have received a “mostly yes” answer, but waiting for a final nod. The scheduled date with the coach in question is looming…so I really hope I get that final nod soon. If I don’t have it by Tuesday I may have to get bold and knock on a C-level door with my best smile in place.

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    1. keep us posted. good for you not only with coming up with the idea but caring enough to document it with all that good support data to make it apparent and justifiable to okay the idea. what were the cost savings?

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  9. Nicely written, Linda. I worked in retail for two summers, but if I ever did anything clever it escaped my attention. The only smart thing I ever did was to sell my 1968 Mustang when I knew it was terminal. And the clever part is that I conned the buyer into thinking he was an expert on cars while I didn’t know a distributor from a tailpipe. He dropped by three days after buying the car (which terrified me, as I’d hoped to never see him again). The Mustang ran two days after I sold it, at which point its transmission blew apart. But my buyer didn’t hold it against me. “I could tell you didn’t know anything about cars!” he said.

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  10. In my little bookshop, my favorite sales were when someone came in seeking something and I had it (or could get it for them easily) – I loved matching people up with their books. One of the best was was when a woman came back after buying a book titled something like “How to Survive Your Aging Parents”, and ordered 5 more copies, one for each of her siblings.

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    1. I like bookstores where there are shelves of books recommended by the employees. I like reading the little reviews they write. I will occasionally buy if the review speaks to me.

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      2. i was killing time in the 1/2 price book store and because i enjoyed the book form the bbc about a list of the books the guy bought i picked up a book about a list of author and artists favorite bookstores and i looked up ann pachette who i know owns a bookstore and saw her write up about a bookstore she visited on booktour in michigan :

        i love bookstores and i love traveling and visiting bookstores while traveling is often memorable.. thiose little staff review notes are excellent.

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  11. Had a couple days of coincidences, which are always fun, some related to marketing. Watched 4 foreign movies with sub-titles, French, German, Chinese and Italian. Kept noticing the use of English words said as we say them, like hi, hello, sure. But mostly OK. The Chinese movie, BTW, was Ang Lee’s amazing “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman” on TCM last night. Third time I have seen it. The story is rich and textured and it has 15 minutes or so of people cooking. Rhapsodic. That was followed by the German Mostly Martha (Bella Martha), which is the vastly superior version of the American version called No Reservations.
    The OK struck me as kind of odd. Then I bought a copy of Believer magazine, whose metier I cannot quite figure out. It’s about almost anything except religion. It had an article on a Coke product they tried to sell to Generation X in 1991-2 in selected cites, not in MN. The marketing campaign was very different, sort of anti-marketing marketing. It was called OK soda because those are the two middle letters of Coke and because a 1991 study determined that the most widely known word in the world is not Coca-Cola as I thought but rather OK. The point of OK soda was also that they were making no overstated marketing claims.
    I was a 17 year failure at marketing. So it goes.
    Fly out tomorrow afternoon, seemingly in good weather but this year I do not trust.

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    1. I used to have a really nice library of films on VHS tape. Of course, the switch to the new TV HD standard made my library obsolete. But “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman” was one of my favorites. Excellent film, and one of the top four food films of all time.

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      1. And Mostly Martha as a food film. Anthony Bordain (or Boor-deign ans I spell it) was doing food moviers last night. Supposedly he will do it the March Fridays on TCM.

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        3. That belongs there, too. That one I own. I bet it is on TCM one of the coming Friday evenings.

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  12. One of my favorite marketing stories: Readers Digest years ago decided to do their marketing campaign in which they attached pennies in the letter. So they ordered 5,000,000 or so pennies from the mint, having no idea how much they weighed and how big a volume that is. Bu the campaign worked once they figured out how to handle those pennies.

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      1. Don’t know; just much more than they thought. A Catholic school in Philadelphia, I believe, was once doing a fund drive where they were going to stack up pennies to some certain depth, a foot or so I think, in their old building. The floor collapsed before they got there.

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      2. Penny weighs 3.1 grams. 454 grams to a pound. That’s 147 pennies to the pound. 147 into 5,000,000=34,000 lbs. or 17 tons if I have my math right.

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        4. an American penny is .06″ thick and .75″ in diameter. Since it is round, and there will of necessity be interstitial empty space between the pennies, you can assume that each penny takes up .045 cubic inches of packed space x 5,000,000 =225000 cubic inches of 130.2 cubic feet, which is about the same space taken up by 974 gallons of liquid, which is approximately 105 bushels.

          Which makes me think I did something wrong, as that does not seem like that much. Unless you were the one who had to carry them, I guess.

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  13. This is one of my all-time favorite Warren Zevon songs, although I didn’t care much for the visuals in this YouTube video. My advice: don’t watch it, just listen. Close your eyes and turn the volume up.

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    1. I do not think I can adequately thank you enough for putting the image of a Mona Lisa sock monkey in my head, with the added bonus of Nat King Cole singing the accompanying sound track.

      It has been a rather grinding down sort of day. Nat King Cole is always good for that.

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  15. thanks linda, if i am not mistaken this is your virgin guest blog. what a nice job. i think if you are specific in your vision in specing the order the creative nod goes to you. if you sold a pair of daisies a vase and a sock monkey as the premise and the answer to the need the peice of meat at the other end of the order doesnt have too many options as to how to arrange the finished product.. im trying to think of what other possible options would have been…. a line of vases with stuffed animals incorporated into the design would be a great hit i’ll bet. the trick would be to get them in front of the correct clientele. where would you see that demographic other than people coming into a flower shop on valentines day?

    i am an idea guy and love the way it makes my brain hurt so good to work through a scenario. my best idea is always my next one. today i have 3 new ones in process. hope one takes off. patience is part of the equation too. time to do it is a part of the equation. travail mugs were a great idea but the amount of time i had to plug in didnt work. i have new ideas on how to do it now so that may pop up again some time. the other three are in process bt still a ways off. developing the route to success is a fun exercise.

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    1. I think the real market for this sort of arrangement is the hospital gift shop. When you get wheeled back to your room after surgery your family is there with a little vase of daisies and sock monkey. Better than vicodin.

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        1. If you could really get the monkeys for a buck…probably about $21. But that sock monkey in the photo is about a foot long and is quite well made, with magnets in his hands and feet. I think you’d have to go smaller on the monkey.

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  16. Well done, Linda. I enjoy your writing.

    My only experience in selling things is at yard sales. I am not very good at talking people into buying things; the only way I can entice buyers is by lowering the price to ridiculously low depths. My last yard sale was when I tried to move hundreds of books out of my life. Some people wanted to shop early – I told them the only way I could allow that was for them to come help set up. That worked – and those people bought a lot of books. Win-win for everyone.

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  17. OMG – I was just flipping channels following “CBS Sunday Morning”… The Monkees are on Channel 5.4 as we speak.

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  18. Afternoon all — hope everybody is enjoying the warm weather. I saw somebody walking down the street in front of my house a bit ago in SHORTS!

    tim – I went to fill in BBC on April calendar and the 20th is Easter. Can we pick another date?

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    3. i think it is puerto rico that celebrates all religious hilidays. there ennd up being ove 100 days a year that are celebrated with no mail, paid holidays etc…

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      1. I think the parka would make quite a statement if you paired it with just the right shoes and a matching handbag.

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