14 DAY TRIAL // Gone are the days when you could walk into a store, pick out some of the items you liked the most, try all of them on and then, if you could afford them, buy them. In Australia, a series of retailers are asking for a $50 fee to try on items.
There’s good reason behind the decision, the Daily Mail informs: some customers only come in to try on clothes so that they can buy them on sale online.
While that’s not a problem in itself, the fact that shop assistants and staff spend a lot of time with potential customers and afterwards, arranging the items, means money down the drain.
As of now, several retailers have adopted this new “fee,” which can go up to $50 and is returned upon purchase, in a bid to prevent people from occupying a changing room if they don’t really want to buy something.
Shops selling skiing gear are pioneers in this trend, because trying it on is a very time consuming process. Shop assistants need to be rewarded in some fashion, even if the customer walks out empty-handed.
Skiwear shop InSki in Sydney being the first to instate the $50 “boot-fitting voucher,” refundable only upon purchase, the Mail says.
“We are a very small business trying to survive. I would never hold it against someone if they got something online for cheaper, but we can’t really work for free,” InSki Store manager Dominik Drexel says by means of justification for the extra fee.
“People will wander into a shop and spend an hour or two with the boot fitter, then go out and buy them off the internet. The owner of the store wants to ensure that if he doesn’t get the sale, at least he pays for their time,” Snowsports Industry of Australia chief executive Eric Henry adds.
Henry also insists that one way of countering this effect that e-commerce has in terms of sales in brick-and-mortar stores is to come up with an initiative where customers can browse the offering online – and then come to the actual store to make the purchase.