In my work as a business analyst, I often find that the customers have pretty good insight into what needs to be done. The vendor, the IT people, and the man signing the cheques all have insight to offer, but the customer needs to be consulted.
Maybe this is why I find shopping so amazingly frustrating. I hate having my time wasted, I hate jumping through hoops that should never have existed, and I am surprised at how incredibly resistant many companies are to simply taking the hard earned money I try to give them.
Shopping carts
Studies have shown that a customer who is handed a basket upon entering a store will tend to purchase more, than a person who has to balance all their purchases in their hands. Enter the shopping cart. Studies also show that a 120lb lady managing 2 kids, rushing to prepare a fancy dinner for guests who are arriving in 3 hours, is 62% less likely to go postal and blow up the grocery store if you put a cart in her hand. One kid goes in here, another “helps” push, the groceries go in here, and she accomplishes her mission on time. Now if a shopping cart increases a customer’s spending while they are at the store, why would stores resist allowing customers to use the carts? I know it sounds crazy, but in my town (I’m sure this doesn’t happen elsewhere) some of the stores have actually “locked up” the carts. They force people to use a round “key”, actually a coin like a quarter or a “Loonie” (In Canada that is our 1 dollar coin) to unlock the cart. Yes you get your quarter or Loonie back, so it isn’t that they need the money from the cart rental… Someone suggested that it was to keep homeless people from taking the carts away. I reject this suggestion as nonsense because $0.25 is a pretty good price for a $180.00 shopping cart. Homeless folks can do math pretty good for the most part and that is an amazing deal. The only solution I can come up with is that the store doesn’t trust you to bring the cart back, and they don’t want to have to send their employee out to collect the cart. (Thanks for assuming that I’m lazy and self absorbed you corporate beancounters). They figure that they will charge you a $0.25-$1.00 cart return fee for not bringing your cart back. Because they know that a student working for $7/hour for 12 hours ($84 dollars) costs them far more than 500 customers who would have purchased one more $4 item ($2000) so you see here they have saved themselves -$1916 which makes the accountants proud because any time you can cut costs by a negative number that reduces revenue, and we all know that revenue is taxable. YECH! taxes.
So enter me… Credit card guy… I pay with my CC I don’t carry cash. NONE! I drive to the store, I get out I look for the carts, and see them lined up with shiny silver chains shackling them together… “Hey do you want me to spend money for 1 jug of milk or 4, because carrying 16 litres (5 gallons for my United Statesian friends) of milk in my arms is ridiculous”? So I do what any self-respecting person would do. I grab one of the carts with the baby seats on top, or one of the extra long kiddie carts that looks like a plastic truck with a shopping cart attached… (they don’t fit with the other carts so they can’t be locked together.)
OR
I go to another store like WALMART which does not lock up their carts because they are smart AND interested in my money. (this is not an endorsement of Walmart, I’ll criticize them for different insanity later).
OR
I go to customer service to learn that I can purchase a “key” to unlock the carts for $1. Now what is the point of letting me buy a key to unlock the carts? If it removes the $1 fee for me not returning the carts.
Ever get the sense that the carts are locked up because the cart salesman was on commission and just happened to be selling the cart locks as well? Let me finish this section on shopping carts with a reference to my favourite store to criticize (because it is so easy). Stupid Store typically has their carts located half way through the parking lot. (half way from the road to the store-front) The really smart people in the crowd will realize that this is a dumb idea because it forces people with “good” parking spots (like the folks in the disabled parking spots) to walk out to the middle of the parking lot to get a cart, which they must then push past their car to the store. After shopping, they drop their groceries at their car, and then walk to the middle of the parking lot to get their $0.25 back, and then walk back to their car to leave. In my town Stupid Store built parking under the store (they built the store higher) which I must admit is a really GOOD IDEA because it reduces the footprint of the store and parking lot, and protects the people and cars from the rain we “enjoy” 6 months out of the year here on the West Coast. So the shoppers have to walk under the store (if they parked out in the front lot), pay their money, and push the cart up a ramp which changes direction half way up.
Cluttered Messy Impassible Aisles
It is comforting to think I am smart, to come up with an idea that most people don’t come up with and to benefit from this. Like realizing that walmart closes at 10PM and starting my shopping at 9:30 because most people have left the store and I can FLY through my shopping.
Except in the evenings at Walmart a funny thing happens. Pallet Jacks (wheeled contraptions for moving wooden pallets loaded with every thing from M&Ms to Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs.) start dumping pallets of product in the aisles as if to begin the transformation of the Walmart store into a warehouse overnight. It is irritating to head into an aisle only to find the exit from that aisle blocked with a pallet (reverse….) but that really isn’t so bad, we keep getting told that everything Walmart does is so that they can offer us low prices (which allows people in sweatshops to enjoy a higher standard of living?).
If you’ve ever been in a new Walmart store and then revisited that store 2 years later you will notice a significant difference in the level of clutter visible in the store. The Aisles are designed to be wide and easily navigated (like the nice aisles in the Target in Bellingham Washington). The aisles have different flooring or painted stripes at the side to clearly indicate where the aisle starts, so it isn’t that the store managers have become confused about where the products should be displayed. It appears to be intentional. Walmart managers or VPs or whoever look at those wide clean uncluttered aisles, and they don’t see happy shoppers free to pass without a micro-traffic jam, they see lost retail space. So rather than making the Aisles narrower, they insert “displays” in the centre of the aisles creating 2 narrower aisles with equally narrow spaces between the displays. What this creates is rows of shoppers pushing carts who can’t see other shoppers nearby (the displays typically extend above eye height). With all the little spaces between the aisles, customers start behaving like they would in traffic, they turn, they merge, they make U-turns, they park in the traffic lane etc. So Walmart regains some precious retail space, and Walmart shoppers regain the traffic headache they had before arriving at the store. They can have traffic headaches outside AND inside the store.
What was otherwise destined to be a pleasant spacious shopping layout, now in atmosphere headed slightly closer towards most dollar stores in terms of cluttered crammed aisles. Congratulations you Walmart bean counters, you’ve taken a great layout and converted it into a mediocre layout. Which probably isn’t actually as frustrating as trying to pay for your purchases at the checkout.
Take my money take my wallet take my credit cards
This phrase is normally associated with an armed robbery where a person wisely decides to let a thief take over his credit card debt rather than risk personal injury. It is also a phrase I’ve found myself (almost) saying while in line to pay for “goods and services” at Walmart and other establishments. Near the place where I work there is a restaurant named WhiteSpot. (previously cleanliness was a value, but the name stuck) We have on occasion attempted to celebrate someone’s birthday or other occasion at this restaurant. Sure the food takes a while to come, but it is ok and we eat it happily enough, what comes next is where the real pain is. Paying can take 15-25 minutes as people queue up with credit cards in hand and servers are hunted down to provide “guest cheques” and impatient overfed diners try to give the business their money. Now if you are as hard working as me, you feel a bit uncomfortable taking an hour for lunch with the entire office, much preferring to munch something from a brown paper bag that allows you to only take 30 minutes for lunch. But after taking 1 hour for lunch, to be forced to stand around for another quarter hour before being permitted to pay for your lunch is ludicrous. Anyone who has run a business or taken a first level business course will tell you about the business cycle, and how the ultimate goal of the exercise is to collect money from the customer you have served. But there you go, they know you won’t run away without paying (the police eat there too). You are stuck with their food in your gut, and you are on the hook. The “girl” keeps wandering away and talking to people and the line of people shifting from one foot to the next with their Credit Cards in hand, sigh and “act Canadian”, and try best to pass the time by thinking up reasonable explanations for their absence from their desks. “We were on a corporate teambuilding experience requiring both stamina and professional conduct… We were… trying to give an unwilling business owner our money”
What the silly WhiteSpot people don’t realize (in their foolish ignorance of what is important to a professional during a lunch hour), is that they have missed out on many many lunches since that time. (at $10 each with 20 people, easily they have missed $600 in sales from our department alone, and I don’t eat out very much!). All for the sake of saying “Suzy, stand here. do not move. Take peoples’ money very quickly so they can leave and other people can have their seats.”
So there you go. oversimplified maybe, but it would seem that there is no end to the apparent shorsightedness of businesses in the interactions they have with their customers.
Menu board madness (AKA: Can I take your order)
I like eating at Wendys because the burgers don’t taste as fat and the vegetables (while anemic looking) are fresh. I’ll order 2 bacon cheesburgers and a water and I’ve come away with an affordable experience I’m willing to repeat almost indefinately (if I wasn’t determined to not eat fast food very often). Last week, we were going bananas with our kids and I decided to treat my wife to “not having to prepare lunch” we pull up at Wendys and look at the menu board (you already know what I’m going to order I’m a creature of habit). The menu board is located right at the speaker where you place your order (-1 point for Wendys) , so the girl tells us she will be with us (1 point for Wendys). Now we are sitting there looking at the options, the pictures, the deals, the fries, the drinks, the prices. We continue browsing the menu as the line of cars grows behind us and we notice that there are 2 prices for Meal #8 (-1 point for Wendys). So I order Meal #8 for my wife and insist on the lower price. The “girl” tells me that the computer says I’m wrong. (Did I mention that I build information systems for a living). I finish ordering and pull up to the window to inform them of the problem with their sign. I’m handed a dime because the computer’s price can’t be changed (0 points for Wendys). We get our food and we pull away.
The mistake on the signboard is easy enough to make if you are posting items in multiple locations (do you think that speeds up customers reading your board, or slows them down?) What bothered me is the entire time I’m finding the food items on the board that I want to order for my family, there is a polite line of cars growing behind me. I’m Canadian, we are programmed to feel bad if we make somebody wait longer because of us. The menu board should have been repeated several times prior to the point where we ordered. (we had to sit behind another car which was ordering ahead of us).
Well I’m pretty sure I won’t make it through another shopping trip without something else to contribute to this article, but I’ll post it. Maybe you’ll smile and laugh at these scenarios, or maybe you run a business and can avoid irritating your customers by remembering my experiences. At any rate enjoy. I wonder if I should start offering retail customer experience consulting, because somebody certainly needs to be doing that.
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