The emerald ring remained in its case, and customers continued to ask about it, and Octavia continued to show it, and one day a woman asked about it who had clearly saved for a long time, and who looked at it with the particular longing of a person who wants something beautiful and knows she cannot have it, and Octavia showed it to her, and talked about it, and did not offer a discount, and did not suggest a cheaper substitute, and the woman thanked her, and left, and came back a week later with a smaller piece she had chosen, and she told Octavia that being shown the ring had not made her feel poor, but had made her feel welcome, and Octavia thought that this was the difference between a shop that sells and a shop that serves: that a shop that serves does not measure a customer by what she can buy, but by the fact that she came in, and asked, and looked, and that the looking itself is worthy of respect.
When the shop hired a new sales associate in the autumn, a bright young man fresh from a chain store downtown, Octavia watched him carefully, not because she distrusted him but because she knew that habits from other shops do not disappear on the first day in a new one. His name does not matter for this story, because he stayed only a few months, but his education does, because it showed Octavia and Tamsin something about how a shop teaches. In his first week, he greeted customers well enough, but he lingered longer with the well-dressed ones, and he hurried, almost imperceptibly, with the others, and Tamsin noticed, because Tamsin noticed such things, and she spoke to him privately, not as a reprimand but as a correction, the way Octavia had once corrected her apprentices at the bench: by showing him what she had seen, by explaining why it mattered, and by giving him a different habit to practice. She told him to greet every customer the same way, to ask the same first question, to open the same case with the same care, and to let the customer's words, not their clothes, tell him what they wanted. He listened, and he tried, and for a while he improved, and then, on a busy Saturday, he fell back into the old habit, keeping a man in a work shirt waiting while he finished with a woman in a tailored coat who had come in after him, and Tamsin saw it, and she stepped in, and she served the man herself, and afterward she spoke to the young man again, and this time she was firmer, and she told him that the shop's rule was not a suggestion but a practice, and that a practice broken on a busy day is a practice that does not exist.
The young man left at the end of the month, for a job at another chain, and Octavia did not try to keep him, because she had learned that not everyone wants to work in a shop where the case opens for anyone, and because a shop is better served by a smaller staff that believes in its practices than by a larger staff that performs them. She told Tamsin that she had handled the matter well, and Tamsin said that she had learned it from watching Octavia handle Hugh, and Octavia said that she had learned it from watching customers, and they both understood, without saying so, that the shop's real training program was not the apprenticeship or the open evenings but the daily example of people who did what they said, and that this example, repeated, was what made new hires either stay and learn or leave and find a shop that suited them better.