Retailers and restaurateurs are newly humble. A woman walked past a clothing store window with discount signs in Marseille, France.
In tough times, one can easily say goodbye to things like designer clothing, fancy dinners and pricey artwork. One more thing that seems to be disappearing? The unwelcoming and snooty salesclerk who sold those things.
As businesses struggle for customers, there is an altered mood, wrote The Times’s Frank Bruni:“extreme solicitousness tinged with outright desperation.”
It seems that any potential credit card holder can now be treated like a star, wrote The Times’s Eric Wilson, who encountered friendly and patient employees at Ralph Lauren, Tom Ford and Prada in Manhattan.
Some companies like Max Mara, the designer clothing label, are putting their employees through seminars where they learn to greet and engage customers, Mr.Wilson wrote. Shiseido, Japan’s second-largest cosmetics company, is training 5,000“beauty counselors”to provide personal customer attention.
Shiseido’s executives emphasize the concept of omotenashi, which means hospitality,“but to Japanese people it means something more akin to an elevated politeness that makes customers feel valued and respected,”wrote The Times’s Miki Tanikawa.“In the end, that attention to detail, and to customers, may turn out to be what pulls consumer product companies like Shiseido through the downturn.”
Collaboration may be another creative strategy. Confederacy, a retail space in Los Angeles, sells dresses by Zac Posen and Marc Jacobs, as well as etchings by Francis Bacon and Francesco Clemente. Boutiques like Robin Richman in Chicago are transforming their spaces into one-stop emporiums offering glittery sandals alongside lithographs and oil paintings, wrote The Times’s Ruth La Ferla.
“You can’t say no,”Monica Serra, an artist, told Ms.La Ferla. She showed her portraits, priced at about $10,000 each, at Mina, a clothing boutique in Manhattan, after the Miami outpost of her German gallery closed.“If the economy was different,”Ms.Serra said,“I might have thought twice. I might have been worried that the art world wouldn’t take me seriously. But what are you going to do - stockpile your paintings because the venue is not right?”
In New York, once hard-to-reserve restaurants like Chanterelle and Per Se are now accessible. Battered by the recession, eateries are reaching out in ways they didn’t before, offering special deals and being very accommodating, wrote Mr.Bruni.
There are recession specials, $35 three-course dinner menus, wine discounts and waived corkage fees, even at the restaurants of best-known chefs like Mario Batali, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud.
Karen Waltuck, one of the owners of Chanterelle, told Mr.Bruni: “We’re all looking around and saying:‘What’s going on here? What can we do to make it better for ourselves and for our clients?’We all have to be clever in our ways.”
The new approach can even be found far from New York and the American recession. The owner of some of Prague’s chic restaurants is letting diners pay what they like. Sanjiv Suri hopes executives will not want to appear cheap to their guests when presented with a blank check after a meal, wrote The Times’s Dan Bilefsky.“Even if they pay nothing,”he said,“they will almost certainly return as paying customers.”
Who knew that in a recession, there actually could be such a thing as a free lunch?
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