The Omega Watch
From Izhak Peled's book “Black Belt: Sales and Negotiation Stories from the Field”
A few years ago my friend and former student Meir told me that for years he had dreamed of buying himself a very expensive Omega watch.
It turned out the watch reminded him of one his late father had given him when he was a boy.
When Meir decides to buy something, nobody is going to stop him. He won't rest until he's bought it...
So he went to the Omega dealer at the Kiryon, a shopping mall just north of Haifa, still in his work uniform (he was a salesman himself) and with about 12,000 shekels in his pocket, the price of the watch.
Meir asked the saleswoman to show him the watch, which was sitting on a high shelf.
The saleswoman told him: "There's no point in me taking it down, you're not going to buy it anyway, it's an expensive watch"...
Meir kept insisting, but it didn't help.
Fed up, he went to a different store and bought the watch there at full price.
A few months later I ran into Meir and he told me the story of the watch.
My blood boiled. If an employee of mine had behaved the way that saleswoman at the Omega store did, he'd have been fired on the spot!
Some time later, I was asked to run sales and service training for all the employees of the Grand Canyon, a big shopping mall in Haifa.
For these sessions, all the mall's employees were gathered in the movie theater, which was closed especially for the occasion.
In the middle of one of the sessions, I told the story of Meir's watch.
When the session was over, two older women came up to me and introduced themselves as the Omega brand managers for the northern region...
A few days later, the employee in question was no longer working there...
As the old Hebrew saying goes, the righteous have their work done for them by others.