Dangle that carrot to shoppers!

French shopper sign: do not touch the new collectionI love shopping when the sales are on, and I love that the new stock sits expensively beside the cut-price old stock so that I can prove to myself that I’m getting a bonafide bargain. Sometimes, I stray to the new stock and end up spending way more than I intended. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Shopkeepers lure you in with the promise of amazing bargains in the hope that you will rid them of old stock and buy some of this shiny new stuff, suggestively placed right next to the bargain bins, while you’re at it.

Apparently, not all shops do this. I came across this sign in a shop in Annecy having a ‘total stocktake sale’ yesterday. The sign says: “Don’t touch the new collection. Thanks.” If you’re good at French, you might notice there’s a missing letter in “novelle” which should be “nouvelle”. Racks of old clothes formed a horseshoe shape around this central rack of new clothes, and two bins of mixed accessories right in front of it. You could say it was the centrepiece, drawing the attention of every shopper, from bargain-hunters to aimless browsers. Are they not cutting off their nose to spite their face in this shop? Why put the new stock on the shop floor if you don’t want people to touch it? Will jeans break if someone touches them? I touched them and the woman adding more sale prices a few racks away didn’t say a thing. No alarms went off and the world carried on.

About

I'm a technical author, journalist and writer from Australia who has been living in Europe since 2000 and exploring the world from there. My passions are writing, snow sports and travel.