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| - The teas that I smelled here all seemed lovely, and from what I gathered the prices are reasonable. My issue today was with the disingenuous and condescending service.
I work at a couple tea shops in the area, so I'm pretty familiar with a variety of teas. After inquiring about the price of a specific tea that I had smelled, I was immediately inundated with questions about what kind of teas I was looking for. I told the employee that I worked selling tea, meaning nicely to imply that I knew my taste and didn't need any introduction to what was on the wall. She persisted, now with an unpleasant, competitive edge in her voice. Did I like Japanese greens? No, I preferred Chinese. Well our Japanese ones are new, here, smell this one. Do they have "ortho" teas at my job too, she asked, using the perplexing Tealish slang word "orthodox" in place of "straight tea", implying that those who prefer a nice pure oolong to something that tastes like a black forest gateaux do so out of an unthinking, conservative rigidity. I know you have to go, but just take a look at one more...
Basically, she was behaving like any pushy employee of any corporate tea shop, much like I do at the one I work at. Assuming the customer knows very little and has no intrinsic curiosity about the product, she and I will dominate the conversation, serving less as a resource and more a subtly condescending sports coach, pushing you to smell just one more, to buy just one more. While it looks like any other quirky, homespun business on Queen West, Tealish apparently operates like the tea-themed amusement parks that fill the outlet malls and the busy streets of the cities of our childhoods (or mine).
I'm by no means an expert with nothing to learn, and I may indeed be an atypical guest. However, her treatment of my informed inquiry into one tea as an opportunity to conduct a generic and manically persistent inventory of the shop's attractions raised my alarm bells. That's the kind of thing I do at my job when I foresee being able to talk a customer into a purchase they never intended to make. Ambushing any visitor, especially one with pre-existing knowledge and interest, with condescending sales jargon does their own thorough, exciting-sounding selection a disservice, and I left feeling the slimy residue of hyperbolic adjectives ("I loved your Hojicha when I tried it--" "Right? It's JUST like SUGARCRISP CEREAL!") smothering any excitement I had about their tea.
My advice? Stick to a store where their selection of "orthodox" (and, I guess, "UNorthodox?") teas are treated like discoveries worth perusing like adults, as supposed to novel commodities to be led past like children.
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