Some sales jobs are easy. If it’s a hot day at the beach and you’re the one driving the ice cream truck, you pretty much just crank up the music box and you’re golden. Or maybe instead of “a hot day at the beach” and “driving the ice cream truck”, it’s “a plumbing malfunction at the rest stop” and “dispensing the hand sanitizer”; or “the rise of the undead” and “sitting on an ammo stockpile.” And instead of “Pop Goes the Weasel” on a neverending loop, it’s whatever else is analogically appropriate.
Anyway, you get the idea. Some things sell themselves, because you’ve got ‘em and people need ‘em.
We’re usually not in such a sweet situation. Our role is more like trying to convince people to buy something arbitrarily. Something that wasn’t on their mind at all before we brought it up. It can be a challenging endeavor, at which we know how it feels to fail.
That’s why we gotta hand it to Big Gemstone for inventing the “birthstone” con.
Say you’re a jewelry merchant of old, sitting Smauglike on a hoard of various sparkly minerals. They’re all different. They’re a bunch of colors, and some are scarcer than others, and probably some are easier to cut or mount or whatever (we don’t know anything about making jewelry). But the difference that bugs you especially is the differing degrees of desire they inspire in your customers.
“How am I going to move all this peridot!?” you might cry to the heavens in frustration. “And what even is peridot? I’ve never heard of it before now.” But actually not this, because you’re a jewelry merchant, so you probably know all about it.
And then it hits you: Birthstones.
You draw up a chart of gems corresponding to months and instantly anyone buying bling has an artificially-implanted affinity for a specific — and arbitrarily assigned — portion of your inventory. Peridot sales are way up, and you’re so busy ringing up customers you don’t even have time to wonder anymore what the fuck a peridot might be, which, in this story, you definitely know, but, as the narrator, it is still bothering me a little. I would at least like to hear it pronounced correctly.
And there’s no downside, because obviously, this (crazy! Made-up!) system of matching baubles to birth months doesn’t preclude anybody from just getting whatever gleaming gewgaw catches his or her fancy. No jeweler demands to see a birth certificate. No Aries is out there side-eyeing every other diamond wearer she meets, like it isn’t their (birth)right to don one.
Maybe the most amazing thing about this whole birthstone perpetration is that it actually does shoppers some good. Buying jewelry as a gift is fraught enough already. Birthstones offer a way to narrow down the choices, and make what is, let’s face it, just a pretty rock, seem personalized to its intended recipient.
It’s an impressive piece of salesmanship, the birthstone scheme. We stand in awe of the unknown geniuses who dreamt it up. It’s some next-level marketing voodoo. We wish we had even a fraction of the creativity it must have taken.
But, like most mere mortals, we don’t. So our cool sales idea was just to price these good.
