Paying extra for something to get great service in old-time Phoenix


In my lifetime, which is turning out to be lasting longer than I'd ever expected, I've known very few people who have wanted to pay more for something in order to get better service. In fact, most of the people I've ever known have been enthusiastic about getting a discount, and not saying that they paid more. Paying more for something seems a very strange, and almost insane thing to do. But people have done it, and some still do.

Speaking for myself, I distinctly remember doing it in my late twenties in Los Angeles, where I paid a LOT of money for some dress clothes at a Men's Shop. I walked in, was greeted, measured, and sold a bunch of stuff which all fit beautifully and looked great. After that, I just knew my size and bought the rest of my clothes at discount stores. I really didn't see any value in going back when I knew perfectly well how to do it myself. Of course if I'd become rich and famous and moved to Beverly Hills, I would have continued doing that, and on Rodeo Drive!

And that makes me wonder about old-time Phoenix, when doing this kind of thing was common. Of course there were discount stores, but even average people would go to a store, be greeted by someone, explain what they wanted, and someone would go get the stuff. If you bought shoes, someone would measure your foot, and then go somewhere and bring the correct size and style for you. You didn't have to walk along an aisle looking for the correct number for your size, which is what I've always done, except for back when I was a little kid.

My parents, who were born in the 1920s, saw this type of service, and both liked it and hated it. They liked the convenience and knowing that they were going to get a great product, picked out by someone with more expertise than them, but they knew that if they went to a discount store they could save a lot of money. And over the years the discount stores won out.


My best guess about why people would pay more for something to get great service in old-time Phoenix had to do with trust. Nowadays it's easy to trust a product. You can trust that the Nikes that you see at any store are all the same. And while it's far from perfect, the laws and regulations have made buying products, from gasoline to whiskey, pretty safe no matter who you buy it from. In old-time Phoenix I know that I would have paid a few cents extra for gasoline from a trusted source, and also I'd be sure to buy my whiskey from Melczers, even if they charged a bit more. I knew that they'd sell me the good stuff!

Nowadays the level of trust is so high that it makes it easy for people to be cheated. This fascination with buying something for less can make people blind to the source. People have learned to buy from strangers. Every once in a while I see a particular company say that they're family owned, and have been in Phoenix for many generations, and some people see a product that they can trust, and possibly pay more for, and some people just see it as just too expensive.
Help support history adventuring, and see a lot of cool old photos of Phoenix on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more