Comment by gwbas1c
2 years ago
Question for adults in "Ask" cultures: How do you deal with adults who ask for unreasonable things or continue to ask for something after you have politely said no?
One example is a salesman at a store like Best Buy who continues to push extended warranties after you say no. (I often resort to losing my temper and saying "If you say another word about the extended warranty, I am going to walk out of the store!")
Another example is an adult that I carpooled with to a political rally. When I told him I telecommuted, he asked me to help him on the campaign during the day. The request was insulting because he assumed that I sat around and did nothing from most of the day.
Later the adult asked me to take a day off of work to fix his computer. At first I pointed out that that was a rude request to make, but he continued to push on me to fix his computer. A day or two later he emailed me screenshots from his computer without me asking for them.
(I should point out that if he had merely asked, "Hey could you look at my computer and help me with something," I probably would have found the time to visit him and help him.)
Regardless of culture, at some point you just have to be able to tell someone to shut up, particularly those who are incentivized to abuse their ability to ask you things (e.g. salespeople).
Well yes obviously!
What's frustrating is that sometimes I hit the pattern of saying "no," and then the salesperson ignores my response and continues to sell the warranty.
At that point I will usually raise my voice and say something like "I said no," as if I was talking to a nagging teenager. Then the clerk will take an insulted tone and say something like, "I'm just doing my job."
So what do you do in those situations??
In that case I think it helps to acknowledge that you understand their incentives/motivations and be even clearer than "no" - salespeople are trained that if you hear no the first ten times you ask and yes on the eleventh, that's still a sale.
e.g. "Look, I recognize that it's your job to try to sell me a warranty, but there's absolutely no chance that I'm going to buy a warranty, so let's focus on the product."
If that doesn't work, then you go straight at their incentives - "Listen, like I said, I'm not going to buy a warranty, and this is becoming distracting. If we can't drop the warranty talk, I'm going to guy buy from somewhere else." They want to sell the warranty, but if they know that's not possible then their next incentive is not to have to explain to their boss why they had a customer who spent a significant amount of time with them but didn't close.
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