Panorama City by Antoine Wilson Page A

were such that when used in conjunction with the UV penlights it could make someone look younger after about two weeks of regular application. He grabbed a tube from the table, opened it, and held it to his face. His nose wrinkled up and then he said he wasn’t about to step into the doghouse by giving his wife something that was supposed to make her look younger. He left without buying anything, but his presence at the table, his standing there for a moment or two, attracted a few more potential customers, which is related to Roger Macarona’s ideas about the ideal number of cars in the drive-thru line, which I will cover later, if there is time. Anyhow, the next potential customer was a woman who had heard me talking about looking younger, she asked me whether the cream could help retard the effects of aging, were the words she used, on the backs of her hands. You might be picturing a very old woman, Juan-George, you might be wondering what kind of old woman goes to a health club and has maintained such keen hearing into old age, but this woman was not in the least old, I believe she was younger than I was, she couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five, if that, and she was in excellent shape, with excellent skin, and the backs of her hands were no different than any other part of her. This is where the genius of Paul Renfro comes in, I mean if I had been trying to sell the antioxidant cream on my own I might have gone to a nursing home, or to the park where the wrinklies played cards, I mean I would have tried to sell the cream to those who could actually benefit from it. But as Paul explained later we were appealing to youth, to the vanity of youth, not the actual skin of old age.
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    While she was deciding whether to buy the cream, I mean she had put some on the back of her hand and was sniffing it, a man who had been standing behind her stepped up to the table, he said he had a few questions. He asked if the cream worked on men or was it just for women. I told him it was for everyone. Then he said he would be interested,but only if he could be sure it worked, he didn’t want to throw away money on something that didn’t work, he’d been snookered before. I said I understood, I said that we’d taken that into account with our money back guarantee. If he used the cream for two weeks and discovered it had no effect on him, which was unlikely, I said, it had been formulated by one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, if it had no effect, or if he was unsatisfied in any way, he could return the unused portion for a complete refund, we stood behind our product that much, some of Paul’s words and some of mine. The man nodded, he carefully read the cardboard sign that Paul had set up, he picked up a tube of cream to assess its weight, he flicked a penlight on and off. He was tempted, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to pull the trigger, his words. What we needed, his opinion, was a trial period. Now the woman who was standing next to him chimed in, she thought that would be a good idea too. I suggested that a money back guarantee was as good as a trial period. The man said that with a money back guarantee it was up to the customer to return the unused portion, it was up to the customer to get his money back, it was up to the customer to wait to get his money back, and so on. With a trial, if the product is truly excellent, the customer pays, and if it’s not, that’s the end of that, there’s no returning anything, no back and forth. If you stand behind your product a trial is the way to go. I considered what he said, I assessed it from all sides, and I thought about Paul and what he had said about the antioxidantcream, and I thought too about how long I had been there already without anyone stopping by the table, and here was an opportunity to actually move some product, as they say. I told the man I’d be willing to offer the product as a trial,