The PIRO (Fiction)

Mrs. Crawford bent over the jars of tea, eyeing them suspiciously.

“And you say these are imported?” she asked. “They look like they could be cut from bushes in my backyard.”

“Yes, m’am. Imported directly from the Yunnan Province. All our Puerhs are,” responded the young attendant, doing his best to exude an air of confidence and intimate knowledge of tea, despite his young age. Mrs. Crawford turned her gaze from the tea jars to him, initiating a vertical scan—from North to South— of such intensity that it would be sure to pick up any and all defects and imperfections. He stood at attention, his lower lip quivering only slightly.

“I will take one ounce of this raw one, here,” she said, tapping one of the jars with more than a hint of disapproval. “That should be around twelve fifty, yes?”

“Yes ma'am, twelve fifty precisely. I’ll get that for you right away.” He lifted the jar from the display shelf and headed for the backroom.

“These are excellent teas.” Mrs. Crawford turned to Bell as the attendant got out of earshot. “But you mustn't ever let on that you know the quality of a tea. Let on, and they’ll swindle you.” Bell was Mrs. Crawford’s eldest child, as well as her youngest child. That is to say, Bell was Mrs. Crawford’s only child, and she carried both the privileges and burdens that came with the role.

“Yes mother,” Bell said, not removing her eyes from her cell phone. She might have heard what her mother said, or she might not have. Who was to say? 

“Once I went tea shopping with Mrs. Junepopper,” Mrs. Crawford continued. “Never again! That little woman,” she twisted her face up with disgust. “She absolutely swooned over a Taiwanese oolong. I saw the glint in the eye of the salesman. He knew he had her. Once her true feelings were out, it was over. That’s why they don’t put any prices on the jars, you see, so they can reach deep into the pockets of us poor old ladies and take us for all we are worth.”

“Here you are madam.” The attendant had returned, holding precisely one ounce of loose leaf Puerh in a delicately packed paper sack.

“Thank you, young man,” Mrs. Crawford said, pressing the folds of her dress downward with a tidy politeness, as if she had not just been maligning his entire profession. “Now, Bell, just take that up to the front for me. I’ve got to run to the powder room.”

Off Mrs. Crawford went to the back, where a wooden sign read “toilet” above a plain, beige door. Up to the register went Bell, as she had been told to do. The attendant followed, walking around the register to assume the position appropriate to the forthcoming transaction.

Bell, as a rule, did not detach herself from the screen of her mobile phone for unsolicited tea purchasing advice from her mother. But Bell, as a rule, always put her phone far, far away when in the private company of handsome, young store attendants, smartly dressed in tailored uniform.

“My mum,” she said, batting her eyes regretfully—not at the attendant himself, but in the direction of his general airspace—“is a piece of work.”

“Not to worry,” the young man laughed. “It comes with the territory.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Certainly. Just yesterday a woman said she could not ‘in good conscience’ purchase any Darjeeling until she had compared the aroma of all of those available. Mind you, we have nine Darjeelings on offer.”

Bell chuckled. “What did you do?”

“Well I couldn’t exactly have her sticking her nose in all our jars. If my boss saw that, it’d be trouble.”

“Of course,” Bell nodded.

“So I removed a half teaspoon of each one, and arranged a little flight of teas for her sniffing pleasure.”

“What a pain,” Bell groaned empathetically. “I cannot imagine putting up with that kind of snobbery day in and day out.”

“It’s not so bad,” he said, wearing a smile that hinted mischief. 

“I couldn’t do it,” Bell said, not sure what to make of the mischievous look. “I’m imagining women like my mother, but worse. And loads of them. Nope, shoot me now.”

The attendant didn’t say anything to that. The grin remained on his face, and he seemed to be turning something over in his mind. “Can I let you in on a little secret?” he asked, lowering his voice.

“Please do,” she rushed, hoping the blush she felt in her cheeks was not properly visible.

He looked around the store, and, confirming that there was no one in earshot, leaned toward her again. “We charge customers in proportion to how difficult they are, using the PIRO. ”

“The PIRO?” Bell asked blankly.

The young man pulled a clipboard from behind the counter, checking the store once more with caution, and spun it around to face her. “The Pain In Rear O-meter” it read at the top of the page. Below that startling title was what appeared to be a complicated formula, with arrows pointing every which way, all of it leading to the bottom right corner where a single monetary value could be deduced. 

“You see,” he said, pointing, seemingly at random, to different parts of the page, “the more difficult a customer is, the more we are able to charge them. So I don’t mind really—the snobbery. It’s actually quite lucrative, for us employees, as well as for the company as a whole.”

Bell’s jaw dropped. She had assumed her mother had been on one of her usual conspiratorial tirades about tea shops swindlining. But, while she’d been wrong on the exact nature of their swindling, swindle they did!

“How do you not get found out?” Bell asked, unable to hide her fascination. “I mean if you are charging variable amounts for the same teas, it seems you’d be discovered quickly.”

“A good question,” the attendant said, his smile growing. “Tea drinkers tend not to talk prices with one another. They consider the cost of their procurements a private matter. Occasionally, sure, it comes up and causes some confusion, but for the most part, our customers are too button-lipped about matters of finance to discover our scheme.”

“I see,” Bell said, nodding with understanding. “But what happens if one of your customers goes to a different tea shop and gets a better price there. Wouldn’t you lose their business?”

“Another great question,” the attendant said, becoming so excited that his cheeks were turning a kind of peachy color. “The PIRO is a carefully developed industry standard. You’d be hard pressed to find a tea shop up or down the coast that doesn’t use it. All of us tea shop workers go to trainings to become PIRO certified. The PIRO board estimates that this standardization ensures we charge customers with ninety percent consistency nationwide.”

“Ninety percent?!” Nicole exclaimed. “That’s remarkable. I can hardly believe it. Surely customers aren’t that predictable, though. We all have good days and bad days.”

“Ah but that’s where you’re wrong,” the attendant crooned. “Any one individual, at least of the tea buying sort, tends to be consistently obnoxious. How do you think your mother knew the Puerh would cost her twelve fifty? It’s certainly not because she knows how much the tea itself costs.” He began filling out the PIRO with a flurry of his hand, checking different boxes and writing out various numbers. “It’s because she knows precisely how annoying she herself is.” Finishing his hammering on a calculator, he turned the clipboard to her once more. Sure enough, he had printed “£12.50” in legible but boyish scrawl in the final box. “See?”

“It’s rather genius,” Bell admitted, regarding the sheet with amazement. “One last thing is stumping me, however. What if two or more ladies go tea shopping together? Surely they wouldn’t all be equally as obnoxious. How can your formula account for them all?”

“This is a tricky one,” the attendant said, furrowing his brow. “On such occasions, the PIRO board advises us to go with the price point of the most obnoxious lady, explaining to the others, who are used to getting a lower price, that there are shortages abroad. Simple laws of supply and demands. Of course we are careful to tell them this out of the ear shot of the most obnoxious lady, who is used to paying this very dear price for her teas on a regular basis.”

Bell had nothing to say.

The attendant regarded her with satisfaction. “It may seem ethically dubious at first,” the attendant allowed. “But if you think about it, in a way, it’s a kind of ultimate justice. Those that treat us kindly are rewarded by truly reasonable prices, and those that make our jobs hellish pay for it proportionally. As my mother always said, ‘Treat others as you wish to be treated.’”

He stiffened abruptly as the bathroom door swung open at the rear of the store. He pulled the clipboard back to his side of the counter and out of sight, and gave Bell a firm look.

Bell tried to deliver, with her eyes, a message that said, your secret is safe with me.

Mrs. Crawford placed her purse on the counter and began to rifle through for her wallet. Sensing something in the air that had not been there when she departed for the bathroom, she paused and looked alternately between the tea attendant and her daughter. She gave a small humph and returned to her rifling.

“I don’t want you flirting with strangers,” she said as the duo made their way through the parking lot back to the car. 

“Yes mother,” Bell said absently, feeling, for the first time in her young life, an occupational calling.