Re: Today's Priceless Supermarket Moment


Dave Smith wrote:

They aren't working hard to keep your business. They are working hard to make it
look like they are working hard to keep your business. What they could be doing is
hiring enough people that there is never a line up. As long as a cashier is ringing
up sales they are making money for the store. I like the idea of dual duty
employees. Bring in enough people to handle the shift. Put some on cash and some on
other jobs. When the cash lines get backed up move them up to cash.

You've never worked in a grocery store, have you? It can be dead 45
minutes out of the hour. Even with only 4 checkers in the checkstands,
we frequently have checkers standing in front of their checkstand,
waiting to bring in the next customer. It gets slow, and they are not
allowed to leave the checkstand because it may get busy again soon. If
you add more checkers and then have them doing something else, you are
paying a higher rate for a lower job, and for more than half their
shift.

The starting pay for a checker is fairly low, only a little higher than
other jobs, but it goes up much higher. And once the person is
classified as a checker, ALL hours worked move the person up the levels
in pay. The companies aren't going to want to give a person checker
raises when they spend most of their time being a helper clerk.




Also, a lot of people have gotten into the habit of shopping on an
almost daily basis. So, while their orders are smaller than a full
cart, they are shopping 5-7 days a week as opposed to once a week. So,
they can be spending just as much as somebody else, just not at one
time.

Not a problem. Let them mingle with the rest of us peons.


Of course, but you are thinking in terms of one person's order on that
day. And most of our sales come from repeat customers. Just because
they spent $5 on one day doesn't mean they don't spent $200 a week
there. You have to consider the larger picture. If you piss off a lot
of customers that have smaller orders, you lose them permanently, and
that means a lot of money lost overall.

You are not losing them to other stores if they offer the same level of service.

Most people that leave a store because of a rude customer or some bad
incident, will usually make a different store their normal store. So
the lost sales are a lot higher than one little order.

There is no predicting what some people will be offended by. Many of those are just
easily offended, and they will end up feeling offended regardless where they go.

. It was a big order that
the other deli turned away. And to top it off, she had a full load of
groceries when she came back to pick up the order. That cartload was at
least $200. I'm sure she planned to buy that all at the other store,
but they were rude to her, and they lost the sale.

Were they rude to her or were they just following their policy. I am reminded of a
thread here a few months ago about Ophrah Winfrey having a hissy fit because a store
would not let her in after closing. While she is filthy rich, so are most of the
rest of their clients, and they might ordinarily have let her in after hours had
they not had another event going on.

And finally, after years and years of this system, don't you think it
would have been changed by now if stores found that removing the
express lanes would improve sales?

No. I realize that some customers will have a hissy fit no matter what they do, but
the only reason they would lose business on that issue would be if the competitors
also do it. I go to several different grocery stores for different things. I go to
one because it has great meat and good prices on their meat. they also have great
service. They only have 4 cashiers, but all 4 cash registers are always open. The
are a lot of things I want/need that they don't carry. I go to a discount place once
a month to stock up on canned and dry goods. I go to the other one because they have
a variety of things I can't get elsewhere. I stopped going to one store because the
staff were always incredibly rude and because they were much more expensive than the
others, and I stopped shopping at another because they checkout lines were always
long and slow.

In fact, we are required to have at
least one express lane open during the day, and the lane should be
shorter than the regular lanes. We have mystery shoppers, and they are
required to count the people in line, and we get points taken off if we
do not enough express lanes open.

That's what I love about the retail business. They will send someone in to check on
you to see how well you are coping with the business with the limited number of
staff you have, but you have to wonder how much shorter those lines would be if they
had an extra cashier instead of a mystery shopper.

We also get dinged by the average
number of people in line, with different limits per type of line. This
is considered a customer service issue, because excellent customer
service means higher sales.

Cashiers ringing up sales are what mean higher sales and as long as your cashiers
are ringing up those sales they are just a marginal cost to get those increased
sales.

.

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