Sir,
Recently I visited a few well-known jewellers of our city with my wife to purchase a gold chain for her daily use. Once we entered the jewellery shop (surprisingly in all shops!!) we got a happy welcome from the gate-keeper who showed few empty chairs to occupy.
Once we took our seat, the sales executive attended to us asking for our need. I observed another person stood beside him and the real story began. My wife started asking for different designs and the executive started getting various designs while the other guy started staring at us and closely monitoring our actions!!
We had a feeling that each of our actions were looked with different reactions (even my bending down to tighten my shoe lace). The result was we could not have a free mind to ask for much more options and we came out nicely rejecting their tea/coffee/juice treatment.
I remembered the olden days (may be 20-25 years ago) where we used to visit the jewellery shops and the owner came running greeting us with a smile and made us comfortable asking about our recent happenings in the family. We had all the freedom to take any ornaments we liked with a request to have a wearing experience. There was no fear for him of losing his jewellery instead he was feeling happy for visiting his shop, having a good chat with him and his team.
Today they are not worried about how many customers visited their shops and what is the volume of their sales but I could see a sigh of relief in their eyes that they have not lost anything by our visit !
My sincere appeal to all jewellery shops is to have a verification counter at the entrance itself and make the identity verification (as we have security check in the airports!!) with Aadhaar card, ID card or address proof and let them be allowed to go with their freedom of ‘happy shopping’ without a feeling of ‘trialled prisoners.’
I always preferred to go to small shops of jewelleries with the known owners for a happy shopping time and now my wife also agrees to it. A long pending dispute resolved for ever ! I am happy. Thanks to international establishments!
– Shashidharan Katteri, Roopanagar, 25.6.2017
NOTE: The correspondent seems oblivious to the changing market economy in the world of gold and diamond jewellery. Old order is changing yielding place to new in marketing goods and services. The small kirana shops of convenience do exist in residential areas along with big malls like Walmart or here in city Big Bazar, Loyal World and the like with their own protocol for reasons of security and theft despite CCTV etc. Did we ever think travelling by air would be so laborious, tiring and humiliating as it is today? Wisdom lies in co-operating with the shop-keepers if we need their service.
– KBG, Editor-in-Chief
I agree with KGB, these are new times when one can’t trust anyone. And no wonder jewelry stores are watching us like hawks while we are just humble constumers. They have their reasons to do so because of a few people whose intentions are otherwise. And the suggestion for ID card checking won’t work because we get fake aadhar card with in 2 hours while the actual takes days to reach you. So the stores can’t relay on our identities when they fake ones look better than the original cards!