I went to Dick’s to test some drivers this afternoon. I had done no research prior except hitting Blastoise at the range. Blastoise is what Evan named his driver except it’s more like a Squirtle. I made 6 swings at the range with his club and hit these moon shots about 250 in the air. His club is a 13.5 degree, regular shaft which is dramatically different than my 9°, stiff shaft Callaway XR.

Brendan greeted me. He said, “in the market for a driver.” I said, “yes.” Then this left handed, Cherry Hill, obnoxious, soccer mom was thrust into the conversation by Steve, the other clerk, and Brendan decided her business trumped mine. I wasn’t too upset and perused the offering while he helped Susan (I made up this name).

5+ minutes later he comes back and apologizes which I said was no problem even though I was seething inside. That’s a joke. We walk to the golf simulator and this is where I could tell he wasn’t paid on commission. I’m not going to toot my own horn here, but I’ve sold millions of dollars of product throughout my career and consider myself a respectable salesman. Brendan, 21 (a guess), is not.

The first question I had for Brendan was, “are you a golfer?” He wasn’t. This isn’t the end of the sale for me, as I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s nice to buy a product from someone who knows more about it than you. Another bad line by him was when he was telling me that good golfers don’t come to Dick’s to buy clubs and he sends them to Golf Galaxy which I thought was comical. At least he’s honest.

So I hit about 5 different drivers and he’s changing the color of each drive on the screen and even though I knew what he was doing, it didn’t strike me to remember what driver each color went with. So we adjusted degrees and tested many and the data was all over the place, as I was pretty sure we weren’t even correlating the colors with the right driver. This made it so I couldn’t make a decision. I asked him what the price was of what we concluded I hit the best and came back with a $500 number.

I told him that I wasn’t sure which was the best for me and left the store. I share this because I care about golf. I want to be informed and make decisions that are going to improve my game. This wasn’t Brendan’s fault, but he didn’t make me feel comfortable that this was going to happen. Who’s truly to blame? The employer, Dick’s.