When I first started teaching, I read the results of an interesting experiment done at the elementary school level. Teachers were asked to participate in a study of young people's impressions of what successful adults looked like. They were given a set of pictures to show the students, and the students were to rate the people in the pictures based on the degree to which they thought they were successful. The teachers were told to say nothing that was not in the very specific script they were given. The teachers were also told ahead of time what the researchers thought the students would say about each one. It turned out the researchers were right--the results were pretty much exactly what the researchers said they would be.
The problem is that the researchers told each teacher something different, and each class conformed to what the individual teacher had been told would happen. Even though every teacher performed the study exactly the same way and even though they all said exactly the same thing, the bias of the individual teachers somehow came through to the students and strongly influenced their decisions.
I think the same thing happens in scuba equipment sales.
Here in Colorado there are very few people who dive BP/Ws. Very few shops sell them. In the shop I used to work with as an instructor, when some of us starting using them and really made a push for them, the shop started carrying them. Because they started carrying them, it was important that they actually make some sales, because it is not good to carry unsold inventory. The problem was that there was not a single person working the retail floor who had ever dived in a BP/W or even seen anyone dive in a BP/W. They only people they knew who used them were those of us who were doing tech. Unsurprisingly, they did not sell a single one while I was still there.
Then I moved to another shop and was given the task of bringing advanced recreational and technical diving to a shop that had previously had nothing but a basic warm water reef trip focus. I am still working on that transition. We now have a line of gear that includes BP/Ws. But once again, there is not a single person working the retail floor who has ever even seen a BP/W in action.
No matter how even handed and objective you may try to be when working with a customer, if you are an employee working retail, your biases will come through, and you will greatly influence the decisions of the customer. Yes, some people will mistakenly say things like, "These are for tech," but even if the employee does not say that, and even if the employee carefully follows a prepared script in explaining the advantages of the BP/W, that employee's biases will somehow come through. It will be a tough sell.
