Vert Means Green.

A few years ago, my parents took their companies’ employees on an appreciation trip to Korea. The trip turned out to be a blast, and everyone was having fun shopping and sightseeing. They hired a Taiwanese-Korean tour guide, and he did his best to get everyone various discounts and even turned every meal into all-you-can-eat.

During their last day of the trip, the tour guide took them to a local specialty/ gift shop. It was a shop that sells all kinds of local food products, and everyone, all 50 of them, was carrying those plastic shopping baskets or even huge paper boxes to shop as if it was an out-of-business sale. My parents, been through at least 5 stores like this one during the previous days of the tour, decided that they weren’t planning to buy anything so they didn’t have a basket with them. They were however open to the idea that this shop might have some products that could potentially intrigue them, so they walked around and tried out the different food samples placed beside each sections.

A store clerk, probably noticed the absence of a basket in my parents’ hands and thought they were just cruising around getting free food, walked up and asked “Excuse me, please stop sampling our products now.”

Feeling embarrassed and disrespected, my dad asked all his employees to put down their baskets and boxes and return to the tour bus. When the tour guide found out, he was furious and complained to the store owner. The clerk who was obviously crapping his pants at that moment, ran out and kneeled down on the floor to ask for forgiveness. My dad decided to let it go, but felt reluctant to ask everyone to go back inside to the shop again – perhaps did not want to lose any more dignity.

My dad was surprised to find out that the store owner actually sent someone to bring huge boxes of free product to the airport as compensation, but he did not accept any since it was never his intention to get a bargain in this process.

Before they got on the plane, the tour guide explained that situations like this will probably get the very clerk fired. I think he probably did lose his job right after the group left, while all those filled baskets and boxes are still sitting on the floor between aisles.