A Little R & D

This weekend at Sweet Tooth we are hosting a Trunk Show from a jewelry company called Obsidian Jewelry.  We have carried a few pieces of their jewelry--primarily silver with gemstones -- and we like it very much.  This time, though, we have several hundred pieces of the jewelry and we are investing some time and a bit of money in promoting this jewelry line.
Here's the catch:  there are many kinds of beautiful gemstones and we pride ourselves on knowing a bit about all the items we sell in the store.  So, of course, we needed to do a little R & D  (Research and Development) so that we wouldn't disappoint customers when they ask:  "What is that?"
For the past hour I have been googling onyx, jasper, chalcedony, quartz, lodalite, drusy and more....trying to develop short, quick but informative paragraphs about all these gemstones so when we get the inevitable question:  "What is that?"  we will have an informative answer.
I wonder sometimes if consumers think, as I once did, that retail is simply ordering, displaying, selling and paying the bills.  It never occurred to me that researching the history of an item would be part of the retail world.
I guess many of us get our concept of "sales" from the stereotypical picture of the car salesman, twisting a customer's arm, embellishing and pushing and out talking the customer to get a sale.
What a shameful way of looking at retail.  Occasionally at Sweet Tooth we get the customer whose attitude about the person behind the cash register is patronizing and negative.  At that point we ask ourselves why standing behind the counter makes us "less" than the person making a purchase.  It's something to think about and hopefully we are working to overcome that image.
What makes the R & D assignment a great deal easier is access to Google.  Just think if I had to make a trip to the library (and by the way, I love libraries) and I had just a short amount of time to come up with the answer to "What is that?".  It would be an all day search.  I'd rather go to the library and check out a great novel or a book of short stories.  I spent plenty of research time in the library when I was in college.  The MLA (for those English majors) was a time consuming assignment....one which at that period of my life I never imagined would be short circuited by something called Google.
The life of a retailer is complex....more so than one might think....full of adventures, new information, interesting questions and customers who actually want to know something about what they are buying. 
This was my day at Sweet Tooth!!