When our shop was first approached to be the seasonal retail provider at Jackson Ski Touring, the executive director made a big point to tell us that we needed to bring the expertise to serve their distinguished clientele. He'd already built up our morale by telling us that we were no better than the foundation's third choice anyway, but the outfits they really wanted didn't want to play.
Coincidentally, our ski reps were advising us that we needed to boost cross-country skiing's image as more technical than people think. Get more detailed in ski fitting. Demonstrate that cross-country skis weren't something that you could get from a vending machine. This was driven partly by the fact that ski construction, especially for performance, fitness, and racing models was getting more technical, and partly just because the cross-country side of the industry was tired of getting sneered at by the much younger but massively more popular downhill segment.
Reps held in-store training clinics. Peltonen held a clinic at Great Glen Trails to go over the nuances of their line and compare it to the other industry leaders at the time. Their tech guy, Jussi, was delightfully blunt about some of the weird sidecuts being marketed to American rubes. Remember Fischer Skate Cut? Ha ha ha. Not even Fischer wants to remember Skate Cut. Skate Cut begat the Cruiser sidecut that they foisted onto tourists for a shamefully long time. It was utter bullshit, but marked part of that period's emphasis on making cross-country seem enticingly technical instead of just like walking with a shuffle.
Into this environment we stepped, with not only our own years of experience in touring, racing, and Telemark skiing, but newly trained in the meticulous process of fitting racing skis.
Racing skis are any skis intended for high intensity use on groomed surfaces. Most of them do not go to racers, because Nordic ski racing is an exhausting neurosis. I mean, you can do a race or two just to see how you do, but you aren't a real racer until you have a "quiver" and a wax kit the size of a suitcase. And you have to train obsessively.
Normal, balanced individuals who don't want to finish a grueling 50K plastered with frozen snot and vomit while sweating through a single layer of Lycra at -5 degrees F can enjoy hours of vigorous fun on their "racing" skis. They still benefit from relatively precise fitting, because the mechanisms of the motion are the same. The equipment has to work with them the same way as for the gaunt sufferer who double-poles an entire 30K classic race because it's the fastest way to both the finish line and early cardiac problems in your 40s.
So...squeezed between the contempt of the Jackson hierarchy and the exhortation of the reps to tech up our presentations, we started encouraging and answering customer questions, extending the sales process, but sending out skiers not only with gear that would serve them well, but with a little more understanding about what the skis, boots, bindings, and poles were doing for them that might not have been obvious.
There was a lot of sloppy misinformation going around, especially about the relatively new area of skating. Skating had been up and coming since the later 1980s, but advanced rapidly in the late 1990s, leading to a surge in retailers similar to -- but much smaller than -- the mountain bike boom that had just preceded it. Lots of profiteers were making things up as they went along, thinking they'd figured it out just by looking from a distance.
The Jackson brass, for all of their talk about wanting to see expertise from us, didn't mean care and concern in fitting skis to customers. They wanted to see high-volume efficiency at separating customers from cash, because they got a percentage of our gross on top of our base rent. Not only that, some of their luminaries got their feelings hurt when the Podunk idiots they'd hired to be their retail flunkies took them to technical school about the equipment. I was told that I made it too hard for people to buy. My answer was that I tried to make it impossible for people to buy stuff that wasn't going to meet their needs and desires. I wasn't just going to foster a misconception to pry money out of someone who would then perpetuate misinformation about the equipment and the sport.
Jackson managed to convey an image of being both welcoming and elitist at the same time. The two exist side by side in Big Nordic because the elites are very elitist, but they do welcome the dubs, because the dubs are more numerous. The dubs actually pay the bills. My sin was in trying to turn as many dubs as possible into more knowledgeable participants. I wasn't hired to help them. I was hired to process them. Take the money and move 'em along. I had come to realize that ski shops serve an important educational function, representing the sport in general, not just their own competitive interests. A shop might be the first point of contact between an interested beginner and anyone they perceive as knowing what they're talking about. I was not going to sell them something wrong, just for a quick sale.
"Wrong" is debatable, of course. Any customer's profile might be met by a range of options. I felt that telling the customer this and pulling them into the selection process would help them later, even if they had chosen an option that I had considered less optimal.
"They won't know the difference" is a common defense by the quick-sale crowd who feels no long-term responsibility to the activity in general. I always answer that they will notice the difference, even if they can't identify it. By trying to instill a little knowledge along with the sale, I hope to plant the germ of some analytical thought, so that the customer doesn't just say "skating sucks," or "cross-country skiing sucks," and drop it completely. Instead they might say, "hey, now I get what that nerd in the ski shop was trying to tell me," and they come back for the better option. At the very least they don't just quit.
