Buying Eye Glasses According To The Retail Jungle

You are knee-deep in tropical plants, exotic birds squawk overhead, and there is mist in the air.  You are in a jungle like the Amazon following a guide through the native environment snapping pictures to remember your trip.  Although many of us haven’t had an actual experience such as this (walking through the Amazon or some other jungle!), we all have been in a “Retail Jungle” either as a tourist or guide in our lifetimes.

Jeff LaPlante’s book, “The Retail Jungle” discusses retail envrionments and the characters in them.  The guides are the experts in whichever jungle (jungle=kind of retail store) they may be from and tourists are those customers or patients coming in to buy some item or service.  For LaPlante, the optical jungle is most familiar as he fell into the field first starting work as a lab employee and moving his way up to optician, manager of an optical store, and now is the Training and Development Coordinator for Signet Armorlite, optical company and main distributor of Kodak lenses.

“The Retail Jungle” shares practical advice (and much humor) about tourist buying patterns be it for stereos or eye glasses.  “Sales Is Not Simple” is something LaPlante discusses as he shares tips and stories to help potential guides (salespeople) learn how to become professional guides and experts for any kind of retail jungle.  Buying eye glasses is not an easy task for many tourists and LaPlante gives insight on how to best approach tourists in an eye wear store and help them choose the appropriate eye wear.

I highly suggest “The Retail Jungle” as a work-read for any kind of professional as the tips LaPlante shares can translate into a variety of workplaces be it for a sales focused employee or mostly a tourist like myself as either way at times we have been both guide and tourist and have had to navigate a jungle!