A couple of weeks ago, I attempted, for the second time, to sell alpaca scarves made by alpaca farmers I know in Bolivia, here in St Andrews. The market was a little more successful than the first, partly because it was inside rather than in the rain, so even if no-one bought anything I nonetheless remained dry.
This time I also had company. An American friend of mine, who had previously helped me to advertise by modelling the scarves, came to keep me company. I was also surprised to know that I already knew the woman at the stall next to mine. She had been selling cushions with pictures of bees and the local towns on them at the previous market. Previously her mother had also been with her, but she had found her mother to be lacking in the wiles of market-selling (she had not given the customers enough space to look at the goods) and had let her sit this one out.
The hardest thing was to know to what extent to try to engage with potential customers - whether to allow passers by to simply peruse the stall, or to actively try to sell to them. My friend tried to make chit-chat with those glancing at the stall by asking how they were. "Don't mind her," I told one potential customer, in a vain attempt to engage her in banter. "She's American - she doesn't realise that 'how are you?' is aggressively friendly to British people. Unfortunately the customer paid no attention, and this merely resulted in a lengthy conversation with my friend about transatlantic greetings. An English friend who came to the stall confirmed that she felt 'how are you?' to be a personal question, and one that would cause her to question the motives of any stranger's inquiry into her health.
Most of the people who did engage in conversation with us, told us how nice the scarves were, but without any intention to purchase. The bee-cushion woman told us she would like to implement a compliment box - like a swear box, which people would have to pay money into every time they told her how nice her things were but without buying anything. We did in the end sell some scarves, though mostly to people we already knew at university.
We weren't, in fact, the only ones selling alpaca goods at the market, though I don't think this affected sales, as the other stall only seemed to be selling balls of wool and jewellery (the necklaces were made of alpaca wool). At one point I got talking to the woman from the stall. She was rather snobbish about the quality of her wool (and British alpacas in general) compared to those from the Andes. "It's such a shame that there are people selling alpaca wool from South America over here, when alpacas from the UK are much better quality", she told me. It was difficult to tell how she intended for me to take this. Although she was giving barbed comments in the friendliest of manners, she had the appearance of a snarling cat warning fellow felines to keep out of its territory.
What she meant by British alpacas being of superior quality, she told me, was that British alpacas are bred for purity, whereas in South America, according to her, alpacas were bred with llamas. When I was in Bolivia I had heard that this happened, but my recollection was that it was nevertheless frown upon, and those who were serious about selling the wool of their alpacas tried to ensure purity of stock.
I was reminded of when I helped my friends to skin an alpaca for the first time. When I asked why we had chosen this particular alpaca I was told that it was because it wasn't suitable to have children. Looking back, this clearly seemed an allusion to the purity of its blood, and an attempt to improve the stock, by ensuring that particular alpacas had children and others did not. When I remarked on this to a lecturer in the department at his house over lunch a few days later he pointed out, very logically, that not being suitable to have children may simply have meant that it was too old.
