“No no, let’s go back the other way, she’s going to try to sell us something.”

“Huh?”

“That Indian chick over there. She’s gonna try to sell us something!”

“Oh, okay, let’s go the other way.”

Little did these shoppers know that “that Indian chick” is so terrible at selling stuff that she had to be taught how to haggle in her early 20s in a Mumbai market by a Scottish friend because no one else had taught her the allegedly Indian skill of bargaining. So if those shoppers had ventured past me, I wouldn’t have said a word.

It was my first time doing an in-store promotion and I was at the biggest, busiest Checkers Hyper in the country. (More about why I was at the store further down.)

Have you ever noticed how pristinely clean a supermarket is before it opens? Of course not. You’ve never been inside before the store opens, to observe dozens of people scurrying about to ensure that all the shelves are neatly packed and that everything is where it needs to be, so that you, the often impatient consumer, can access whatever you need in an instant.

As I was setting up my table, a friendly store manager said, “you don’t look like the average promoter”, as he walked by, and I smiled because I wasn’t sure what he meant. A few minutes later, the presumably average promoters walk past me to set up their promotions. They looked like beauty queens. Young, pretty, lithe and with perfectly made-up faces. As I wiped the perspiration off my brow with my old-fashioned hanky, I realised that I’m the antithesis of the average promoter.

I remembered what my grade six music teacher told me when she threw me out of the school choir, “you have a talking voice, not a singing voice”, as I steeled myself to work hard on winning people over with what I hoped was a convincing pitch in a convincing tone.

I also reminded myself that the beauty queens worked for agencies and were there to promote products from international conglomerates. Shoppers might be drawn to them, but they’re unlikely to be as passionate about their products as I am about mine.

My first interaction with shoppers was the one I described above, with the people who went out of their way to avoid me and while other shoppers were similarly disinclined, and sometimes rude, a much higher percentage were decent people, who smiled, tried out my product and were generally civil.

Of course, my first promotion wouldn’t have been complete without running into a few people I know. There was someone that I thought was from the comms agency I worked at recently, but it turned out she was from another company in the same building and there was a friend from the Mail & Guardian, who couldn’t hide how amused/horrified he was to find me doing an in-store promotion. He insisted on taking a selfie of us so that he could show everyone at the M&G what I was doing now. (I don’t think I’m allowed to swear in this column, but I very much want to at this point.)

After the selfie, I thought all I needed was for my high school maths teacher to pitch up, the one who told me I’d be a failure in life because I dropped from higher grade to standard grade maths in matric. Thank goodness, she didn’t turn up. (And by the way, maths-teacher-who-shall-not-be-named, I have NEVER needed trigonometry, or calculus, or even solving for flipping X in my entire life!)

By now you’re probably wondering why I was in the store to begin with. Last year, after I emailed countless retail buyers and CEOs, one of them replied to my email – Shoprite CEO, Pieter Engelbrecht. Shoprite Checkers is serious about developing small businesses and Engelbrecht (and his team), gave us the opportunity to list our product in select Checkers stores, and despite this significant break, we can’t even be described as prawns, let alone fish, in the fast-paced retail supplier ocean. We’re so small and so barely visible on shelves crammed full with products from gigantic corporations, that we’re more like the microorganisms that whales fart out – ie: we’re vital to the ecosystem but hardly noticeable.

And while we’re exceedingly grateful to Checkers for this opportunity, there’s still a great deal of hustling to do to get our business off the ground, hence the need for in-store promotions by people who don’t look like the promoters you’re used to, but are determined to do whatever it takes to succeed. DM