an elderly couple walks into a store
Wait a minute—that’s not us. That can’t be us. Really. We don’t think of ourselves like that—there are no canes, no walkers, and we move purposefully, head up, backs straight. Youthfully fashionable dress, more or less. No old people clothes.
And we’re pretty sharp cookies—we (mostly) know about Google Docs and zip extractors and we (sort of) know who Ella Langley and Charli XCX are.
But, yeah, my hair is gray and our faces are lined and an elderly couple is probably how we looked and indeed we are, we have to acknowledge, the elderly couple walking into a store.
That is, we have now realized, we probably looked like an easy mark as we walked into the store. Like the kind of people who could be easily convinced, maybe confused, possibly deceived.
We walked into the big box electronics store because we needed two new smartphones. As we head over to the smartphone display, the young man—maybe he’s 20?—approaches us.
“Looking for new phones?” he asks pleasantly.
We are naturally reluctant to engage, but say, finally, yes we are.
“Hey, that’s great,” he tells us. “Because there’s a real special deal going on right now.”
He tells us his first name, asks for our first names, shakes our hands. He may only be 20 but he’s good, very good, quite smooth.
The real special deal going on right now is, he tells us, that we can get four new phones—“the absolute very newest”—for free. Just for changing cell phone carriers. We can save a lot of money and get a lot more. Because there’s this special new deal going on right now.
As it turns out, there are four people on our phone account, both of our kids there with us, so four new phones does sound attractive even though we only really need the two new phones.
But how could four phones be free, we ask, since we’re not trading in any of our current phones?
The young man explains that with the special deal all we’d have to pay is the tax and then he explains some more about how it works with switching carriers and later, my wife and I both acknowledge, we didn’t really fully follow the rest of his explanation.
“Well, what would the monthly cost be?” my wife cleverly asks.
“What are you paying now?”
We tell him. He looks up our account, jots down some numbers and says our monthly would be even less, and we would have an unlimited plan not the limited plan we have now.
My wife is very good at asking questions. And for every question she asks, the young salesperson has a seemingly good answer.
We take a moment to confer.
“If it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” one of us says, but he’s answered or seems to have answered all our skeptical questions. And so we both sort of agree that this does really seem like an exceptional deal, a deal we can’t leave—because it’s only a “limited time” deal.
Let me just stop for a moment here and point out that we are a couple who normally, usually, belabor every decision; who research all purchases to the nth degree and cross reference hotel recommendations before we book. We scan multiple flight schedules prior to making a reservation and spend hours mulling over the best towels to buy. We thoroughly investigate orange juice expiration dates.
Yet, here in the store, without much more debate, without too many further questions, without—unbelievably!—asking for all the particulars to be put down in writing and to take time to ponder all of them and decide what we want to do, on the spot we take the deal.
In other words, we act like an easily buffaloed elderly couple who didn’t think things out before jumping into something they didn’t fully understand.
It should go without saying, then, that the great deal didn’t turn out to be such a great deal. The four free phones didn’t turn out to actually be completely free. The lower bill wasn’t actually lower and didn’t take into account the cost of moving from one carrier to another.
But maybe the worst part of the deal was the late-arriving realization that we indeed had been the stereotype, the obvious marks, the easily deceived elderly couple that walked into the store.