this kid sold me $65.55 worth of plastic and metal

Thursday I sent you a picture of a skateboard I bought last weekend.

​Here's that email, in case you missed it.​

Yesterday, I decided to take that skateboard to the skate shop to get it in working order.

The place is less than a mile from my apartment, and it is so much more than a skate shop.

It's also an indoor skatepark. On top of that, they have arcade games too.

And on top of that, before Covid, part of the building served as a church on Sundays...

Which explains the coffee-shop looking setup I see when I walk in. (Nashvillians aren't going to church unless single-origin pour-over coffee is being served at the door.)

"I just need some griptape for this board," I say, holding up my skateboard as I step up to the register at the skate shop.

"Which color do you want? Just black?" Skateboard Jesus yells to me from the rack of different colored grip tape options.

I should probably clarify who Skateboard Jesus is.

He's a skinny dude with long, graying hair and a graying beard. He has rings on almost every finger, and the reason he is called Skateboard Jesus is because he is at least five years older than me...

Which makes him my savior in this moment -- because prior to this point, I thought I was the only person over age 25 in this entire building without a child in tow.

"What colors do you have?" I ask.

Skateboard Jesus runs through the colors, and when he gets to "clear," I've made up my mind.

"Ooh, let's do clear," I tell him.

So The Kid rings me up (we're calling him "The Kid" now, because he deserves a name too).

It's $7.65.

And then Skateboard Jesus puts the new grip tape on my board.

As he's finishing up, I grab my old skateboard (which is split in half) and ask:

"Hey man, while I'm here, can we also put the trucks from this board on the new one? I'm happy to pay extra for that."

("Trucks" are metal pieces that hold the wheels onto the skateboard.)

"Oh yeah, we can definitely do that. No worries," says Skateboard Jesus.

But as he takes the trucks off the old board and starts to put them on the new one, he notices a problem.

"You're gonna hate this..." he says. "The holes on this new skateboard don't line up with the holes on the old one."

... which means that the old trucks won't work.

The Kid walks up to examine the situation.

"I think we have some trucks in the back that might actually work for this," he says.

So he goes in the back and starts looking.

No dice.

He comes out and looks at a pair of trucks in the display case by the register.

"You know what," he says, "These might actually work."

He grabs them and walks over to my incapacitated skateboard. He and Skateboard Jesus line them up to show me what they'd look like.

"Yeah man, those look pretty good," I say. "But before we do that, I guess one other option is for me to drill new holes in the board and just use the old trucks. What do you think of that?"

And this is where The Kid sells me.

"Yeah, that's an option," he says. "But the challenge with that is that you have to get the holes juuust right. Because if they're off-center at all, your board is going to ride weird."

"Yeah... I don't want that kind of responsibility. Let's go with the new trucks."

The Kid also recommends plastic pieces called "risers" with the new trucks, along with some new hardware to install the whole setup.

By the time it's all over, what I thought was going to be a $7.65 bill has now turned into a $73.20 bill.

... a $65.55 difference.

But now, I know that my skateboard is going to ride like exactly like I want it to...

And I don't have to do any of the work to make that possible.

Skateboard Jesus puts the new trucks on the board. Then I thank him and The Kid and leave.

Here's the lesson:

When someone buys something -- they're not just buying the physical product.

I think it was David Ogilvy who said that "we sell the sizzle, not the steak."

... or something like that.

Anyway, when I bought those new skateboard trucks yesterday, I wasn't just buying two pieces of metal...

I was buying the peace-of-mind that I would be able to walk out the door with a skateboard that worked perfectly...

No hard work and no stress involved.

After leaving the skate shop, I picked my dog, Wallace, up from my apartment and took the skateboard to the park for a test run.

​Here's a video I shot while doing that (featuring Wallace).​

Robert