What I Learned from a Pair of Shoes I Didn’t Buy

A beautiful, simple life through Danshari® and fermented foods.
A little yohaku — a small open space — can set you free.
Hello, I’m Chibanyan, also known as Hiroshi Chiba.
I’m a certified Danshari® trainer authorized by Hideko Yamashita, and also a first-class fermented food expert.
We are right in the middle of Golden Week here in Japan.
How is everyone doing?
To be honest, this newsletter may not even be opened until after the holidays.
Yesterday was Midori no Hi, Greenery Day, one of Japan’s national holidays.
I had a little free time, so I went out to Yokohama.
And, well.
Everywhere was crowded.
Really crowded.
I found myself getting tired of it rather quickly.
People seemed to be coming from everywhere — tourists, holiday visitors, people who were not usually there. I felt as if I was almost bumping into someone every few steps.
Now, the reason I had gone out was that I recently let go of one of the only two pairs of leather shoes I owned.
So I thought, “Maybe it’s time to buy a new pair.”
In the end, I didn’t buy anything.
But I did get to try on several pairs, and the experience itself turned out to be surprisingly valuable.
The shop was crowded too, and all the staff looked busy.
I happened to make eye contact with one of them, so I asked him for help.
Then I noticed his name tag.
He was a new staff member.
Oh dear, I thought.
But by then, there was no turning back.
Perhaps he had gone through training in April, and this Golden Week was his first real battlefield.
He was, by the way, extremely good-looking.
But his customer service was very stiff.
The conversation did not flow.
Whenever I asked him something, he would say,
“Please wait a moment.”
Then he would disappear into the back room to ask someone else.
Every single time.
So everything took quite a while.
Because he was not yet confident, he could not answer on the spot.
Because he was simply passing on someone else’s words, his explanations had no real persuasive power.
And little by little, I began to feel uneasy.
He had not really listened deeply enough to understand what I needed.
So his responses became rather mechanical.
The conversation did not build, layer by layer.
He asked, “Shall I measure your feet?”
So he did the task.
But it felt very much like something he was doing only because it was written in the manual.
As he was measuring my feet, I found myself thinking,
“It would be nice if he said something while doing this.”
But whenever I tried to start a conversation, he would immediately say, “Please wait a moment,” and disappear into the back room.
So even I became hesitant to ask anything.
And so, quite a lot of time passed.
Still, I reminded myself that this was probably one of his first real customer service experiences.
He was doing his best in an unfamiliar situation.
So I decided to go along with his pace.
It seems I was there for nearly an hour.
In the end, a more experienced senior staff member came out and gave me what I can only describe as real customer service.
He explained things clearly.
He told me what kinds of adjustments could be made in certain situations, how the shoes might change after about two months of wear, what basic points to consider when choosing them, and what kinds of fitting corrections would be possible after purchase.
That was extremely helpful.
I was glad I had gone all the way to the physical store.
After all that, though, I had only managed to visit one shop.
So I decided not to buy anything on the spot, and to look around a little more before making a decision.
And here is what I learned.
When we are focused only on doing our own job, we may stop seeing the customer in front of us.
And that can happen in Danshari home support sessions too.
I looked back on my own past and thought,
“Yes, I must have done that myself, at least to some extent.”
So in the end, it was an outing full of unexpected insights.
Customer service is truly difficult work.
And a few months from now, I would like to see that young staff member again, working with confidence as a full-fledged professional.
That was what I thought as I left the shop.
Nyan nyan!