African Sales

One of the surprising aspects of life in Africa, has been the selling. Everyone sells, it seems – and more or less the same products. I’ve seen hundreds of stores during my month here, some as large as a department store back home, others little more than a table or a thatched roofed stall. And there’s also a whole flotilla of “door-to-door” salesmen, who, like my friend HappyGeorge, wander around with their stores in backpacks, ready to lay them out at the earliest sign of a prospective customer.

During my hour long walk down the beach on Thursday, however, I wasn’t expecting to run into any selling.

 Wrong.

As I was coming to the natural end of my beach walk, a place where the sandy beach turned into a large mass of rock and water, two men, who had appeared to be sitting idle, suddenly turned into salesmen. Out came the backpacks, and before I knew it, an entire beachfront store had appeared – with the usual array of paintings, wooden figures, beads, bowls and wooden keychains.

“I didn’t bring any money with me.” I told them.

That was OK – they would still like to show me their wares, and I could arrange to pay – they needed money for food.

I’ve learned that it pays to look, as you never know when you might encounter someone with talent, or at least someone with cheap prices, if not talent.

I “Mmm” and “Hmm” and “Very nice” –d my way through their demonstrations, nodding approval at the wooden objects I liked, but didn’t intend to buy, along with my new usual comment, “Not buying today, maybe tomorrow.” Which is, according to one of the books I have read while here, a nice polite way to reject an African salesperson.

There was one wooden bowl I liked, and bargained the guy down from 3800 kwatchas to 2500 – and told him that I would come back in the morning with money to buy it.

Next morning, who should show up but the two salesman, camped out in front of the house, on the beach. Somehow, they had tracked me down….ninety minutes away from where they had started out!

Anything for a sale…