The Merch Tent Meltdown: How an Employee’s Hidden Quality Check Completely Ruined a Soccer Dad’s Proudest Brag
Shutterstock
Do you ever get sticker shock when you see what something costs at an event or venue? For example, imagine going to buy a hoodie at a sporting event. What would you expect to pay?
In this story, we hear from someone who used to sell merchandise at soccer tournaments. The products were official products from big brands like Nike, but one customer interaction was quite memorable. It was a dad who bragged about how little he paid for a hoodie by not buying it at this merchandise tent. The weird thing is that he’s bragging about it to the person working at the tent!
Keep reading for all the details.
Dad Thinks He Got Same Product For 1/2 Price
For a couple years I did some occasional work for a family friend, he was part owner of a company that sold merchandise at soccer tournaments.
The company had some pretty major contracts and literally would get it’s inventory directly from the brands, ie contact Nike with the product orders and hope they could fill it.
This didn’t prevent people from thinking we were selling knock-off or overpriced products, which does happen at smaller local tournaments.
One dad sounded pretty annoying.
There we are selling at a boys tournament with about 80 teams from all over the country, the week prior was the girls tournament and with the same number of teams.
I typically ran the smaller tent at the smaller venue but would end the night at the main tent if they were still open.
It’s pretty late 8-9pm, usually about the time we start wrapping up, when this dad shows up with a Nike hoodie for us to heat press the event logo onto, the logos are to heat press on the non-event product we carry but when we start running low on product we give some leeway.
The dad said something along the lines of, “I knew those hoodies weren’t worth 60 bucks, I got that at the outlet and it was only 30!”
OP took a look at the hoodie.
The only things we wouldn’t sell at MSRP were event product because those also included the price of being screen-printed and even then it was only an extra 5 dollars.
While going to heat press it I look at the tag and he was right, he got the hoodie for 30 dollars and it was the same style, except it was a much lower quality material and you didn’t even have to touch it to tell because it looked like lower quality material.
Regardless, I heat press the logo onto the hoodie, fold it so the logo is facing up, and hand it back to him.
He takes the hoodie and leaves thinking he outsmarted us, while a couple of the other dads from his son’s team apologize for his behavior.
You get what you pay for.
Trending and Popular
Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.
This person would’ve handled it differently.
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
Another person hoped for a different ending to the story.
I can’t imagine bragging about getting something at a discount to someone selling items that cost more. Where is the logic in that?
Clearly, you get what you pay for. Even if they were both official brand name hoodies, the one that cost more was a higher quality hoodie.
Maybe the dad in this story doesn’t care about quality. But he could’ve just kept his mouth shut about the price.
He was incredibly rude.
Trending and Popular
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
