to be pissed off with snooty shop assistant in Selfridges in kids clothes dept...

[blighter]

twas' similar to the scene from pretty woman. i love going to selfridges with dd, we like a good mooch & to have lunch in the 4th floor restaurant. dd wanted to have a look at the clothes in the childrens section so i obliged although not my scene, dressing kids in designer clobber, so it was a mooch. tbh i enjoyed looking at the price tags, unbelievable. anyway, the lone women assistant was giving out vibes that i irritated her. she may as well come up to me and said 'fuck off, we don't want your kind here, it is obvious to look at you that you aren't going to buy anything'. she came up and no sooner had i let go of the price tag to one garment than she had immediately tucked it back in. i don't dress in a typical way of alot of females that shop there, rebellious but i tend to dress down rather than up when i go there. i do like good labels but not for a 9 year old, no way (each to their own). i am sure that if i had been dripping in prada & dior she would have been full of smiles/arse kissing. makes it all the more vile

I think it's very easy to feel intimadated in places like Selfridges and to project our own feelings of inadequecy onto the people who work there (although that said there are some individuals out there working in all kinds of shops that are far too arrogant for their own good - I can think of one assistant in Topshop who left me dumbfounded with her behaviour). Last weekend I went in to Selfridges in my running gear, post-gym and definitely not looking (or probably smelling!) my best and I did not feel the slightest bit uncomfortable dealing with the assistants I came across (who were all perfectly nice to me) and I think that is probably because I am not concerned what anyone else thinks about what I might be wearing and therefore I don't project any negative feelings on to them.

When I didn't have any money I felt scruffy and often felt like people where watching me, expecting me to pinch. It was in my head. My partner pointed out to me the only person who cared about what I looked like was me, I carried myself differently and kept looking about all the time which made me look suspicious!!

Lolz. I was trying on an insanely beautiful leather jacket in Liberty (normally very friendly staff and incredibly easygoing/polite even when you are only buying a pair of socks) with price tag £995. I don't ever wear designer labels and was dressed in my usual H&M/Primark ensemble, but this baby was seriously gorgeous. I don't say this lightly but would potentially have considered it should I have the money to spend at any point in the future (granted I didn't have it then, who does ffs) - ie if DH wanted to buy me some very special jewellery in the future/we won the lottery this would have been in my mind... Anyway I'm sorry to say the shop assistant walked over and basically hovered around me 'watching' me (she didn't do the usual shop standard 'can I help you' type thing which would at least have entertained the notion I was even capable of buying it) like I was a three year old with an ice cream and about to spoil the jacket. My friend who was with me was totally shocked and gave her best 'back off buddy' looks to the shop lady. It was a shame as it did spoil my very special moment with the jacket :-) no way would I bother buying it after that malarky. Makes me wonder who DOES buy these things?!

"Makes me wonder who DOES buy these things?!"

the people who the shop assistant considers 'suitable' apparentley

"i don't look like the type of person that you would expect to spend alot of money on clothing"

"I don't ever wear designer labels"

"Makes me wonder who DOES buy these things?!"

And here you all are complaining about shop assistants who don't regard you as a shopper who is actually going to buy something :)

"fuck her, she earns a shit salary anyway!!!"

porcamiseria Tue 03-Apr-12 15:21:22

AND YOU EXEPCT ANY LEVEL OF SERVICE WHEN YOU SHOP?
Hang your head in shame?

I popped through Selfridges on a recon today (won a giftcard! yay!)

I do generally look like I've been dragged through a hedge backwards but the assistants I spoke to were perfectly pleasant. I find it a little intimidating as a shop tbh, it's very shiny and the assistants are impeccably groomed, but at the end of the day it's a shop (albiet a very posh one, although they do have a H&M concession...) not court or a church and I won't dress up for it.

I'll continue to treat the assistants with a friendly demeanor because that says more about me than any perceived slight or frosty glare.

The only reason that people pay the price they do for designer clothes is that it allows them to stay away from the lower echelons of society. You were breaking a social taboo by disregarding the financial barrier your "betters" have put up against you.

cailindana I hate to break it to you but some luxury items really are worth the money. But like everything, that's only if you can afford it.

Otherwise, it's true, clothes are there to keep you warm and decent.

You're not breaking anything to me. A cotton shirt is never worth £300. Never. No matter how well made it is. It might perhaps be worth £100 at a stretch. People pay for the label, so that they can show off that they have a lot of money. I don't know why they might deny that. Other luxury items might be worth a lot of money, but single items of clothes costing over £100 are a status symbol, nothing else.

A guy came to work one day acting very proud of the (expensive) Armani shirt that he had bought. He was waxing lyrically about how he liked it because of the 'hang loose' fit. I said to him that for £50 less he could have bought the same shirt from M&S except they call it a 'loose fit' shirt.

He was not amused :o

I like reading fashion mags but i often laugh when I see a £250 plain leather belt or £80 plain patterned socks. Then there are the plain looking white gold watches with leather strap for £5000. For that kind of money I expect some bling or at least lots of gold.

I used to work in Harrods years ago, and we were always told not to judge a customer by what they were wearing one day I sold a La Perla bikini (nearly £300) to a girl dressed very scruffily the next day she came back and bought another La Perla bikini in exactly the same colour but a different style, I commented to her that I recognised her from yesterday and hadn't she bought the other style and she said "yes but I like the bottoms from this one and the top from the other"...£600 on a bikini and she looked like a student.

To be honest it is the most boring job, it is slow it isn't like you are rushed off your feet selling and she was probably just fed up at someone else just browsing and not buying anything.

No, cailin I'm talking about luxury items rather than designer goods.

They can sometimes be the same thing but generally aren't.

So I can't agree with you that a cotton shirt is never worth £300. You just might not want to pay that much. Which is a different thing.

It depends on the grade of cotton, how it's woven, the country of manufacture of the garment - labour costs in EU and other First World countries will load the production price - the skill involved in the manufacture such as the number of stitches to seams per inch - the higher number being the more expensive because the shirt will look better and last longer without puckering, the buttons - mother of pearl is more expensive than plastic. That's before we start thinking about decoration and handwork.

No one needs a cotton shirt that costs £1000 though believe me, some do and more.

That shirt will have a smaller profit margin than a shirt of inferior quality whether sold at Next or Prada.

The most value-for-money labels in terms of quality for cost are Louis Vuitton, Burberry Prorsum, Ralph Lauren Black Label, Hermes, Celine and some Chanel. Other labels that are less high profile are Loro Piana, Malo and Ballantyne.

Astronomically expensive, but it depends what you want and how much money you have to spend. Some people are rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

I used to work in a shop in Camden which sold rubber and fetish clothing, as well as clubbing gear. You could spot the timewasters who'd just come in for a giggle a mile off after about a week of working there. Even the ones who thought they were being oh so subtle at having a giggle at the items.

She correctly assessed that you were not intending to buy anything. That makes her perceptive, not a bitch. All you were doing was entertaining yourself and making work for her.

"A cotton shirt is never worth £300. Never. No matter how well made it is."

Have you any idea how much work goes into a single haute couture piece? Hours of fitting, stitching, hand sewing and refitting and resewing. In time alone it can be worth thousands.

poosh that's what I'm going on about. Armani's style is for loose things, particularly in menswear. It's not always flattering unless you are tall and athletic and if you have a great body it's a crying shame.

DH is in luxury menswear. He's happy to point people who don't want to or can't pay for his clothes in the direction of M&S, especially for business or dinner shirts and suits which he thinks are unbeatable for the price and of reasonable design and manufacture.

Why wouldn't he do that? He's a nice man who wants people to have something they like, like most people in shops.

He's so nice that when a towering prat acquaintance of mine opened his jacket to show off the Paul Smith label saying: 'I imagine you don't deal with anything of this quality' he was able to answer quite truthfully: 'No. I don't.'

I'm on a roll poosh I kind of agree with you about watches.

For women they are generally fashion items and have little or no intrinsic value. Though you wouldn't get a solid gold watch and bracelet for £5,000. At least twice that at gold prices today.

For men they're different. It's the only piece of jewellery most men wear and men are very interested in function and authenticity. So a £200,000 watch from a respected watchmaker such as IWC or Audemar Piguet seems very reasonable to some people.

Bloated plutocrats, dictators or oligarchs, mostly. There are a lot of them about. To answer someone upthread: they are the people who are buying these things for themselves or for their wives and mistresses.

If you saw the money that some people have, and the sort of people that Gideon, Dave and Blair and Mandelson before them, sucked up to, you would be first at the barricades.

There's a difference here between worth and value.

An object is worth its value if someone thinks it is, whether they want to buy it or not.

I think that the beautifull top I have been looking at in Debenhams is definately worth £47. Nicely made, lovely material, I'm sure it would make me look slimmer too. But I'm not going to buy it so I wont waste my time and their time by trying it on IYSWIM?

A £300 shirt is not "haute couture." Burberry shirts cost about that and they're machine made to a standard design by machinists paid a typical wage for skilled manual labour. A bale of cotton costs about £50 to the manufacturer, meaning a single shirt costs about £30 at most to make. The only thing that means you pay 10 times what it cost to make is the label. Some people feel that the label is worth it, because it is a status symbol. Yet they won't admit that. I don't see why.

A co-worker and I was having a similar conversation about designer perfume and she was saying how you get what you paid for.

The subject was something I had covered as part of my Consumer Marketing course so I had the facts at my fingertips. The perfume in a £35 bottle of perfume cost £2. This is not a typo. The other £33 is profit, packaging and advertising. I don't know what the latest legal rulling is but about a year ago one of the supermarket chains was discounting the designer perfume they were selling. The luxury goods company tried to block wholesalers from selling to the supermarket. Why? If the Asda Shopping Brigade was wearing their products then their products wouldn't be able to command a premium.

My co-worker obviously wasn't going to admit to herself or to me that she paying for a fancy bottle and Posh Beckhams Hollywood lifestyle so nothing I said got through.

Its kind of 'funny' how the ad men manage to convince so many people that expensive = better.

I agree Poosh. Perfume in particular is a massive scam. The chemicals in it are dirt cheap, the main cost to the manufacturer is the bottle!

Cailin I listed the reasons for the price of some items. You can buy a bale of cotton for £50 or less and get it manufactured more economically.

But I thought we were talking about luxury goods.

A £50 or 60 Euro shirt could not retail for less than £125 in London. In more expensive parts of London, given rent, rates, other fixed costs and staffing it could easily have to sell for £300 or more for the shop to turn a profit.

That's not greed. That's profit margin. We do agree that people are entitled to make a profit, don't we? Otherwise no one would sell anything and we could just barter stuff.

Your example of a £30 shirt would retail in the same areas for proportionately the same. Maybe it would be worth it given its quality relative to its price at the till or just the general enjoyment it gives.

I'd guess that many 'designer' shirts come in at far less than £30 to manufacture but that's not my area of expertise.

Which is why I made a careful point of distinguishing between 'luxury' and 'designer' which aren't necessarily the same things.

I also listed some of the manufacturers and their different lines and gave my opinion on value for money which is not the same as retail price.

You mention Burberry. Burberry Prorsum, which I mentioned, is owned by the Burberry group and is its premium product. It has a lower profit margin than the average Burberry product because it is of better quality. Both are very expensive but the Prorsum label is much better value for money if you have that money.

I don't expect most people to know that. I do expect them to respect my knowledge.

Like you, I don't see why people don't admit things.

Like when they have inadvertently made a mistake.

I never mentioned luxury goods at all limited. If you look at my original post I said designer goods, and that's what I've continued to talk about. You seem quite annoyed, and that wasn't my intention, I don't really care much about this, so I'll concede that I've misunderstood what you've said and we'll leave it at that.

Poosh We all know that aside from rare extracts from the arse glands of civet cats perfume is just alcohol with synthetic scent in it.

Manufacturers of premium goods are trying to protect the image of their brands.

I like a bargain as much as anyone but I can see why Chanel does not want its scent on sale in Superdrug or down Deptford Market because if it was I wouldn't want it and neither would anyone else.

Just look at what happened to Burberry's image after that picture of Daniella Westbrook and her child.

If you spend billions on marketing you are going to be quite touchy.

okay cailin. I'm not annoyed btw, it's just my method of debate. Have a good evening.