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alarawriting · 4 years

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52 Project #4: Rand Mart

All I wanted to do was buy a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and ham. But I’d been to four cash registers already, and no one had been willing to ring me up yet.

The first cashier – a girl with dyed black hair, a tattoo of a dove on her cheek, and nose and tongue piercings – informed me that she’d ring up my bread, but she was morally opposed to the consumption of animal products, so the conscience clause permitted her to refuse to ring up my milk and ham. The dark-skinned woman with a red dot on her forehead, at the next cash register, would ring up my ham and bread, but told me that the American milk industry was unconscionably cruel to cows, who were beloved in the eyes of Brahma. The woman with the light blue scarf around her mouth, nose and hair, at the third register, was willing to ring up the bread and milk, but thought that pigs were unclean and their meat banned by the Prophet. And the fourth cashier, a bearded man with a yarmulke, wouldn’t ring up any of my goods, because it was Saturday.

There was a self-service lane, of course, but it wrapped around the entire cash register area with about forty people queued up in it because no one wanted to go to a cashier-operated register. I’d thought that the fact that so few people were lined up at the registers meant that I’d get through the line quickly. I should have known better.

There were two other cash registers open. On one, a painfully thin woman was haranguing a slightly overweight woman over her choice of sodas. “High fructose corn syrup is pure poison!” she was shouting. “It’s murder! If I let you buy those Sprites I might as well be putting a gun to your head!” At the last cashier-operated register, the clean-cut young man behind the counter was ringing everyone up for all their products… as long as they accepted Christ as their personal lord and savior.

Screw this. I abandoned my groceries in one of the many, many baskets set outside the cash registers for exactly that purpose. The baskets were overflowing. I wondered how the supermarkets made any money anymore.

And then I did what I’d sworn I’d never do again. I got in my car, and I drove to Rand Mart.

***

Rand Mart was infamous for being a terrible employer. It abused its employees, forcing them to work unpaid overtime, failing to give them health care coverage, busted any attempt to unionize, and fired them for absenteeism if they were ever sick at all. I wouldn’t have been caught dead there under any other circumstances. But I wasn’t willing to lie my way into the Christian-only grocery stores, and the service at the secular grocery store was getting steadily worse.

Ever since the Conscience Clause Laws, created originally to allow pharmacists to get out of filling prescriptions for drugs whose purposes their religions disapproved of, were expanded by Supreme Court decision to allow any person to refuse any duty in the course of their work, provided that they had a “heartfelt moral objection” to performing it… more and more people were discovering the joys of sticking it to their employers (and customers) by developing heartfelt moral objections to any number of things. Their employers weren’t allowed to fire them for it, either.

Originally it had been based on religion, until the vegans sued, claiming that just because their belief that meat was murder was not based on the teachings of a god, it was no less heartfelt or moral. The Supremes bought that, deciding that when the Founding Fathers said that Congress should establish no religion, which had been extended to Congress not infringing on any religion, that any heartfelt moral belief counted as a religion for the purposes of not being infringed on, because it wasn’t the business of the law to decide what was and was not a religion.

Corporations weren’t allowed to practice religious discrimination in hiring unless their own heartfelt moral beliefs would be compromised. So the Christian-only stores could get away with hiring only Christians – which had made them very, very popular lately, even though they’d only let Christians shop there, because most Americans are Christian at least in name and most Christians didn’t have a religious objection to selling anyone anything, as long as it couldn’t be used to allow women to enjoy sex without guilt. But a secular store couldn’t demand that its employees actually do their jobs, because no one had a heartfelt moral belief that employees should do work, apparently.

Except for Rand Mart.

Rand Mart had successfully won the right to discriminate against any employee of any religion who wouldn’t do their job on the grounds that their heartfelt moral belief was Objectivism. They believed (heartfeltedly and morally, it seemed) that the government should not interfere in contractual matters between employee and employer, or consumer and vendor, and that therefore they had the right to sign their employees to contracts that stated that they accepted the inability to raise a religious objection to anything as a condition of employment, and make it stick. They used the Hobby Lobby case as precedent along with the Conscience Clause decision to prove that a corporation had the rights to adhere to the heartfelt moral beliefs of its owners even if doing so trampled on the rights of its employees.

As a result, you could get absolutely anything at Rand Mart that they felt they’d make money on selling to you, and no one could raise any sort of objection. Guns? Sure! The Second Amendment and the Conscience Clause meant that they didn’t have to do background checks, because that was government interference with their relationship with their customer, and they believed they shouldn’t have to abide by that rule. Abortifacients? You betcha! They weren’t the only ones – sex shops frequently invoked their heartfelt belief in the right of all humans to sexual pleasure and control over their own bodies to sell things like birth control, Plan B, and actual abortion drugs, without prescriptions, and no one could really stop them because they had the names of everyone who’d ever used a credit card to buy sex merchandise, which included most of the fine, upstanding citizens who tended to protest abortion clinics. But Rand Mart was the one you would go to if you didn’t want to walk through displays of lingerie and dildos to get the pill. Marijuana? Rand Mart didn’t believe in anti-drug laws, and while they were sane enough not to provoke the government on stuff like meth and heroin, they sold weed quite openly, and the Feds were more likely to bust a legal California grower of the medical grade stuff than Rand Mart.

Obviously, given their willingness to sell such culturally controversial stuff, you could get any of the basics at Rand-Mart as well, and none of their employees were allowed to refuse to sell to you. So I drove over there, because I really, really wanted my bread, ham and milk.

As usual, Rand Mart’s parking lot was a zoo. True confession time: this wasn’t the first time I’d been driven to have to go to the place. Every time I went here I swore I’d never do it again, and while my abhorrence of their treatment of employees was one reason, the behavior of the other customers was another. Pedestrians were everywhere, because why should they have to follow rules like the presence of crosswalk markings to make life convenient for drivers? They had the right to walk and they were going to walk, dammit. This, of course, made the drivers of the other cars frustrated, and when you considered how tiny the parking spots were and how quickly they got snapped up, you had frustrated, angry drivers rapidly turning into slavering, starving beasts who’d savage each other for a parking spot. Road rage deaths were not unheard of in Rand Mart parking lots, including incidents where folks used their brand new Rand Mart guns to put a hole in a fellow shopper for fender bender accidents caused by overeagerness to take a parking spot. I parked all the way out at the end of the lot and walked, careful to avoid the cars who were taking out their aggression against the thick clouds of pedestrians in front of the store by nearly running down the ones walking to or from their cars.

The way Rand Mart is laid out, you have to walk through an entire aisle of really cheap impulse buys and sales items before you can even get into the store proper. Then the groceries are all the way on the other side. Shoppers inside Rand Mart are every bit as considerate as the ones outside, which is to say, I had to dodge a lot of folks who were walking straight at me as if I wasn’t even there, or as if they wanted to play Store Aisle Chicken. I was really, really glad I needed so few things and didn’t need to push a cart, because there were so many endcaps and stands of merchandise and random pallets of restock that I couldn’t see how a cart could get through half the aisles.

I plugged my metaphorical ears to the siren song of really cheap electronics, and really cheap DVDs, and really cheap winter jackets, and really cheap kitchen appliances. (I’m a bachelor. I don’t really cook. I do, however, make a lot of use of rice cookers, and toaster ovens, and single-serve coffee machines, and I own lots and lots of other kitchen appliances that promise to pretty much make my food for me, despite which I still never use the damned things.) In what seemed like a long and peril-fraught journey, but was actually probably about three or four minutes, I got to the grocery aisles and started looking for the stuff I’d come for.

And then I ran into Emily. Wearing a Rand Mart uniform, and stocking yogurt cups onto the shelves.

Emily used to be my manager. I work in IT, where the controversies are few; as long as we don’t hire any Amish dudes, we’re not likely to get saddled with deadweight. However, the hours are long, and Emily decided she wanted a new career that would let her spend more time with her young son, so last I’d heard, she’d opened a day care. Considering that this was Saturday, I supposed it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that this was her second job, but Rand Mart was infamous for giving their front line employees really egregiously varying schedules with totally inconsistent amounts and times for hours, so they weren’t generally compatible with having, or being, a second job. “Hey, Emily!” I said. “How’s life been treating you?”

“Oh, hey, Brad. You’re looking pretty stressed. They giving you a hard time at work?”

“Oh, no, no, I’m just stressed because I had to come to this place,” I said. “Six cashiers at the Allfood, and none of them willing to ring up a simple purchase of ham, milk and bread.”

“Don’t I know it,” Emily said. “The other day I was in Curtains and More with my son, just trying to get him some new bedsheets, and they practically threw me out of the store because I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. I told them I don’t wear it because my circulation’s not great and my fingers swell up, but they didn’t believe me. I had to show them my wedding picture in my wallet before I could buy a damned thing, because they thought I was an unwed mother, and that’s sinful. Do you know every single employee in that place is a pregnant woman?”

“What, do they fire them if they’re not pregnant?”

“The owner’s into some odd Christian sect where you’re supposed to have as many babies for the Lord as possible. So I guess they’re not always pregnant, but they’re always either pregnant, on maternity leave, or they’ve got a little baby. It’s crazy.”

Her story reminded me that I needed to get cups for my coffee machine, and that as far as I knew coffee wasn’t against anyone’s religion. Maybe I’d drop by Curtains and More myself. I was a single guy without any kids, so I figured I wouldn’t run into the problems Emily had. “Are they one of those places where you have to be Christian to get in?”

“Oh, no, no. That’s what tripped me up; I was completely not expecting to run into an issue like that. They looked secular.”

“So why’re you working here at Rand Mart anyway? Still doing the daycare thing?”

She shook her head sadly. “No… I couldn’t keep it going. I hired a couple of extra workers, trying to expand – you know, the state’s very strict about how many children you can have per working adult. Well, it turned out that one of them had a strong Christian belief in ‘spare the rod, spoil the child.’ Apparently it’s a central tenet of her religion that you have to beat kids.”

“Oh my god. Really?”

“Yup. Obviously I couldn’t let her anywhere near the kids – she made it clear that if she saw them engaging in bad behavior, she had to follow her moral beliefs on how to ‘train them up’, rather than my instructions. Well, I could have lost my license for allowing any corporal punishment at all on my premises, so I couldn’t let her anywhere near the kids, but I couldn’t fire her, because Conscience Clause. So I had her running errands, but what I really had needed was someone to watch kids. Without being able to take on the extra kids that her watching them would have allowed me to take, I couldn’t afford her salary.”

I shook my head. “Unreal.”

“I managed to eventually fire her for taking too long to run her errands, but I had to document it for months so she couldn’t claim it was an illegal termination on religious grounds. By then it was too late – I was too far into the red to recover. I had to declare bankruptcy. I couldn’t get hired back into IT management because I guess making a sudden shift into running a day care made me look flaky? Or out of touch, anyway. So, you know, I’m still looking, but I’ve got to pay the bills, so…” She shrugged. “Here I am.”

“That sucks. I’ll check the internal postings, see if there are any openings at the company. I’m sure they’d love to have you back.”

“That’d be great,” she said. “But listen, I gotta finish this and clock my task completion time so they don’t dock me for excessive inefficiency.”

“Oh, yeah, I understand. I gotta find my groceries, myself. See you around!”

“Sure, see you,” she said, and went back to unpacking yogurts, this time pulling them out of the box in stacks of three and shoving them onto the shelf as fast as she could go.

Once I had my groceries and I was checking out, I ran into my old friend Ryan, who was working the cash register. “Ryan! You’re working at Rand Mart too?”

“Sad but true,” he said.

“Thought you were working at that hipster coffee place.”

“Went out of business last month,” Ryan said regretfully. “We hired this one guy who would not stop aggressively proselytizing to the customers, and people just felt really uncomfortable ordering coffee from someone who kept insisting that they embrace the Lord. The owner tried to keep him in the back, but you know, small coffee joint. There’s not much to do that isn’t in the front, customer facing… he’d do unloading and garbage runs but the rest of the time there was nothing for him to do but work out front.”

“Yeah, I just heard about my old manager’s day care folding because she hired the wrong person.”

“It’s bad, all right,” Ryan said. “The small businesses can’t take it, and even the bigger ones are starting to feel it. That’ll be $15.99.”

For a pound of deli ham, a loaf of bread, and a gallon of milk? I goggled at the receipt, glad I hadn’t tried to get the coffee single-serving cups here. Well, Rand Mart never pretended to have the lowest prices on groceries; they’ll just sell you anything you want without a hassle, and that’s enough of a draw that they can charge out the wazoo. That and all the cheap impulse buy stuff creating the illusion that the store’s prices were overall low. “You guys are definitely cleaning up on it though,” I said as I swiped my credit card.

Ryan snorted. “I’m out of here first chance I get. There’s a new burger joint down the road, Charley’s. I put in an application there and we’ll see where it goes.”

“Is that one of those places where you have to wear flair?”

“Naah, flair is corporate now. They do have all the kitschy plastic toys all over the ceiling though.”

“I’ll have to check them out.” Maybe today. A burger sounded good. I was getting kind of hungry.

As I walked out of Rand Mart, I swore to myself that this time, this time, I wasn’t coming back.

***

Charley’s was a low-key kind of place, dark wooden beams and light brown wallpaper showing great sports stars from the entire 20th and 21st centuries, despite which it was actually not a sports bar. It was rare to find a burger joint that was neither excessively corporate, nor did it have 25 television screens showing different subchannels of ESPN. Their menu said they were all about the social experience, implying to me that one lone dude like me was probably not their target customer. On the other hand I’ll do a lot to avoid the black attention sucking hole that is large television screens with no sound. I’m not into sports nearly enough to want to see Ukrainian men’s field hockey or whatever ridiculous crap they show on ESPN17, and especially not enough to want to see it with the sound off and no captions.

I was pleasantly surprised by how fast my server collected my drink order and came back with my Coke. She was a cute brunette with curly hair. “I’d like to get a Works Cheeseburger, hold the spinach,” I said.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that.”

I blinked at her. “Are you out? I don’t have to have all the toppings—“

“No, I mean, a cheeseburger isn’t kosher, so I can’t put that order in for you. Sorry.”

Oh, not this again. “Come on. You’re working on Saturday. You can put in a cheeseburger order.”

“No, I really can’t. I have to work on Saturday because I need the hours, but I do keep kosher.”

I sighed. “Can you get me a different server, then? I came here to get a cheeseburger.”

“I could get you a cheese veggieburger… the tofu ones taste really authentic.”

“No. I want a cheeseburger. Made of beef, and cheese. Are there any other servers who’ll take my order?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t refer you to any of my colleagues,” she said. “If it was just a matter of you preferring a different server, that’d be one thing, but I can’t get a different server for you when I know that I’m enabling you to get a cheeseburger.”

“Okay, I’m not going to order a cheeseburger, but I don’t like you and your sanctimonious attitude, so just go get me a different server because I don’t like you.”

“No, sir, I know you’re lying and you really are going to order a cheeseburger if I do that.”

I glared at her. “Look, I know enough about Judaism to know that you don’t need to enforce the kosher laws on non-Jews, so what justification do you have for not letting me order a cheeseburger? Don’t the kosher laws just apply to Jews?”

“Yes, but I can tell you’re actually Jewish.”

I blinked. “No, I’m not.”

“Well, of course you’d say that, sir, since you don’t keep kosher and you don’t keep the Sabbath, but I know a Jewish man when I see one.”

I had a roommate who was Jewish once, and that was the full extent of my connection to Judaism. “Look, I’m not. Really. I’m allowed to eat a cheeseburger.”

“I sincerely believe that you probably are, and you’re lying to me because you want a cheeseburger.”

So I gave her two bucks for the Coke, which was $1.99, and told her to keep the change. If she was hungry enough to take Saturday hours despite being dedicated enough to her faith to enforce kosher on non-Jewish customers, maybe a spate of 1 cent tips would persuade her to let customers order a cheeseburger in a goddamn burger joint. Or maybe they’d cause her to quit. What the heck was someone with a religious objection to cheeseburgers doing working in a burger joint anyway? I bet she wouldn’t have let me get a bacon burger either.

To be honest, I was pretty sure she was enforcing kosher laws on a non-Jew because she could. Used to be that every store treated its employees more or less the same way Rand Mart does. Long hours, low wages, and if you didn’t take the customer’s abuse with a big smile, you could lose your job, no matter how unreasonable the demands. Nowadays, the hours were longer and the wages were lower – businesses couldn’t stay in business with all the deadweight they were forced to carry if they didn’t exploit the hell out of their workers – but employees could get away with nearly anything if they expressed a heartfelt belief. In fact, I’d read an advice article online that suggested that as soon as you got a job in retail, you should come up with some religious reason to deny a customer something, because then if they tried to fire you for anything else, you could sue them on the grounds that it was retaliation against you exercising your First Amendment rights.

Dammit, I was really, really not in the mood for McDonalds’ or something. The last time I’d tried to go through a drive-thru, I’d found out that the fry cook on shift that day disapproved of the high carbon footprint left by cars, and was refusing to allow any of the fries to go out via the drive-thru. Plus, I’d really wanted a good burger. Rand-Mart had one of those snack bars that they have at places like Target, but I was pretty sure their burgers were at best a single step in quality above McDonald’s, if not the same or worse.

I decided to go to Anomie. Their food wasn’t the best, but the good thing was, you put in your order through an electronic kiosk, swiped your card, and people you never saw in the back, who never saw you, would take whatever orders they felt they could morally accept. Then the food would be slid to you through a numbered slot, kind of like the idea behind the old Automat. You never had to see a single person that worked there.

***

After a mediocre cheeseburger I managed to obtain without interacting with a single human being, I felt somewhat up to going and getting my coffee. It’d be cheapest at the grocery store, but I wasn’t going to go back there if I could help it – even though I was pretty sure none of the cashiers I’d run into would actually prevent me from getting coffee, except maybe the Sprite Is Poison lady, I still didn’t feel like paying any of those people’s wages. So I decided to try Curtains and More. If they weren’t the kind of store that would try to check my religion before letting me in, what was the worst that could happen?

Ten minutes later I was standing in front of a security guard who was saying “I’m sorry, sir,” while blocking my entrance to the store. “You can’t go in there.”

I stared at him. “Why not?”

“Well, you’re a man, sir. Men aren’t allowed in Curtains and More.”

“…My friend just was here and she never told me men aren’t allowed. She brought in her son.”

“Boys under the age of 10 are allowed, but men aren’t. Our corporate policy at Curtains and More is that men and women shouldn’t mingle socially, so they shouldn’t shop at the same stores.”

“So is there another curtains store that just sells to men?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir. I don’t make the rule.”

“But you’re a man.”

“Yeah, I have to stand out here all day. I’m not actually allowed in the building.”

“So how do you punch your time card?”

“There’s an app for that. I have to do it with my cell phone.” He sighed. “Kind of dumb, if you ask me, but what’re you going to do?”

“Shop somewhere else, I guess.” I shook my head. “I thought these folks were Christians.”

“They are, but they’re some weird sect that thinks men and women shouldn’t see each other unless they’re family.”

“And that women should be pregnant all the time?”

“Didn’t know that, but I’ve seen employees go in through the side door, and yeah, most of them are pregnant. Is that why?”

“That’s what I heard,” I said glumly. “Why do they let women in and not men, I wonder? Most of these kinds of places discriminate against women, not men.”

“I don’t know, but I don’t have to turn too many guys away. I guess men don’t shop for curtains as much.”

“Guess not.” It was as good an explanation as any. “I’m gonna have to go back to Rand Mart, aren’t I?”

“I hear they’ve got a pretty good selection,” the security guard said.

***

I figured I’d probably end up back at Rand Mart, but I had to at least try to avoid it, so I tried a few other coffee places; most coffee places sell pods for coffee machines, after all.

I tried Starbucks, and walked right back out as I heard the cashier refusing to serve unbelievers. I didn’t even know what they were unbelieving in, and I didn’t care. The Dunkin Donuts was run by someone who professed a sincere and heartfelt belief that children should work in the family business, and I didn’t want to be served by an eight-year-old again. There was a hipster coffee joint, but they wouldn’t let me in because my belt looked like it might be made of real leather, and they believed strongly in veganism. I considered leaving my belt in the car, but then my pants might fall down in the coffee shop, and I wasn’t risking that. Besides, people like that might give me some song and dance about single-serve coffee pods being terrible for the environment, or something.

And that was how I found myself going back to Rand Mart, about an hour after declaring I was never going back again.

I passed a group of employees on smoke break on my way in. They were holding “HOMELESS AND HUNGRY – PLEASE HELP” signs. I gave one of them a five. For all I knew my friends might be there next month.

Then I dodged around an excessively aggressive cart return guy pushing a conga line of wheeled death, and slipped into the store. I was beginning to come to the conclusion that no matter how many times I vowed I’d never come back here, I’d never be able to keep that promise.

#52 project #alara original writing #political satire

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wickedbananas · 6 years

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Getting Real with Retail: An Agency’s Guide to Inspiring In-Store Excellence

Posted by MiriamEllis

No marketing agency staffer feels good when they see a retail client getting reviews like this on the web.

But we can find out why they’re happening, and if we’re going above-and-beyond in our work, we just might be able to catalyze turning things around if we’re committed to being honest with clients and have an actionable strategy for their in-store improvements.

In this post, I’ll highlight some advice from an internal letter at Tesla that I feel is highly applicable to the retail sector. I’d also like to help your agency combat the retail blues headlining the news these days with big brands downsizing, liquidating and closing up shop — I’m going to share a printable infographic with some statistics with you that are almost guaranteed to generate the client positivity so essential to making real change. And, for some further inspiration, I’d like to offer a couple of anecdotes involving an Igloo cooler, a monk, reindeer moss, and reviews.

The genuine pain of retail gone wrong: The elusive cooler, "Corporate," and the man who could hardly stand

“Hi there,” I greeted the staffer at the customer service counter of the big department store. “Where would I find a small cooler?”

“We don’t have any,” he mumbled.

“You don’t have any coolers? Like, an Igloo cooler to take on a picnic to keep things cold?”

“Maybe over there,” he waved his hand in unconcern.

And I stood there for a minute, expecting him to actually figure this out for me, maybe even guide me to the appropriate aisle, or ask a manager to assist my transaction, if necessary. But in his silence, I walked away.

“Hi there,” I tried with more specificity at the locally owned general store the next day. “Where would I find something like a small Igloo cooler to keep things cold on a picnic?”

“I don’t know,” the staffer replied.

“Oh…” I said, uncomfortably.

“It could be upstairs somewhere,” he hazarded, and left me to quest for the second floor, which appeared to be a possibly-non-code-compliant catch-all attic for random merchandise, where I applied to a second dimly illuminated employee who told me I should probably go downstairs and escalate my question to someone else.

And apparently escalation was necessary, for on the third try, a very tall man was able to lift his gaze to some coolers on a top shelf… within clear view of the checkout counter where the whole thing began.

Why do we all have experiences like this?

“Corporate tells us what to carry” is the almost defensive-sounding refrain I have now received from three employees at two different Whole Foods Markets when asking if they could special order items for me since the Amazon buyout.

Because, you know, before they were Amazon-Whole Foods, staffers would gladly offer to procure anything they didn’t have in stock. Now, if they stop carrying that Scandinavian vitamin D-3 made from the moss eaten by reindeer and I’ve got to have it because I don’t want the kind made by irradiating sheep wool, I’d have to special order an entire case of it to get my hands on a bottle. Because, you know, “Corporate.”

Why does the distance between corporate and customer make me feel like the store I’m standing in, and all of its employees, are powerless? Why am I, the customer, left feeling powerless?

So maybe my search for a cooler, my worries about access to reindeer moss, and the laughable customer service I’ve experienced don’t signal “genuine pain.” But this does:

This is genuine pain. When customer service is failing to the point that badly treated patrons are being further distressed by the sight of fellow shoppers meeting the same fate, the cause is likely built into company structure. And your marketing agency is looking at a bonafide reputation crisis that could presage things like lawsuits, impactful reputation damage, and even closure for your valuable clients.

When you encounter customer service disasters, it begs questions like:

Could no one in my situation access a list of current store inventory, or, barring that, seek out merchandise with me instead of risking the loss of a sale?

Could no one offer to let “corporate” know that I’m dissatisfied with a “customer service policy” that would require me to spend $225 to buy a whole case of vitamins? Why am I being treated like a warehouse instead of a person?

Could no one at the pharmacy see a man with a leg wound about to fall over, grab a folding chair for him, and keep him safe, instead of risking a lawsuit?

I think a “no” answer to all three questions proceeds from definite causes. And I think Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, had such causes in mind when he recently penned a letter to his own employees.

“It must be okay for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”

“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the 'chain of command.' Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere. A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen. In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a 'company rule' is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.” - Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla

Let’s parlay this uncommon advice into retail. If it’s everyone’s job to access a free flow of information, use common sense, make the right thing happen, and change rules that don’t make sense, then:

Inventory is known by all store staff, and my cooler can be promptly located by any employee, rather than workers appearing helpless.

Employees have the power to push back and insist that, because customers still expect to be able to special order merchandise, a specific store location will maintain this service rather than disappoint consumers.

Pharmacists can recognize that patrons are often quite ill and can immediately place some chairs near the pharmacy counter, rather than close their eyes to suffering.

“But wait,” retailers may say. “How can I trust that an employee’s idea of ‘common sense’ is reliable?”

Let’s ask a monk for the answer.

“He took the time...”

I recently had the pleasure of listening to a talk given by a monk who was defining what it meant to be a good leader. He hearkened back to his young days, and to the man who was then the leader of his community.

“He was a busy man, but he took the time to get to know each of us one-on-one, and to be sure that we knew him. He set an example for me, and I watched him,” the monk explained.

Most monasteries function within a set of established rules, many of which are centuries old. You can think of these guidelines as a sort of policy. In certain communities, it’s perfectly acceptable that some of the members live apart as hermits most of the year, only breaking their meditative existence by checking in with the larger group on important holidays to share what they’ve been working on solo. In others, every hour has its appointed task, from prayer, to farming, to feeding people, to engaging in social activism.

The point is that everyone within a given community knows the basic guidelines, because at some point, they’ve been well-communicated. Beyond that, it is up to the individual to see whether they can happily live out their personal expression within the policy.

It’s a lot like retail can be, when done right. And it hinges on the question:

“Has culture been well-enough communicated to every employee so that he or she can act like the CEO of the company would in wide variety of circumstances?”

Or to put it another way, would Amazon owner Jeff Bezos be powerless to get me my vitamins?

The most accessible modern benchmark of good customer service — the online review — is what tells the public whether the CEO has “set the example.” Reviews tell whether time has been taken to acquaint every staffer with the business that employs them, preparing them to fit their own personal expression within the company’s vision of serving the public.

An employee who is able to recognize that an injured patron needs a seat while awaiting his prescription should be empowered to act immediately, knowing that the larger company supports treating people well. If poor training, burdensome chains of command, or failure to share brand culture are obstacles to common-sense personal initiative, the problem must be traced back to the CEO and corrected, starting from there.

And, of course, should a random staffer’s personal expression genuinely include an insurmountable disregard for other people, they can always be told it’s time to leave the monastery...

For marketing agencies, opportunity knocks

So your agency is auditing a valuable incoming client, and their negative reviews citing dirty premises, broken fixtures, food poisoning, slowness, rudeness, cluelessness, and lack of apparent concern make you say to yourself,

“Well, I was hoping we could clean up the bad data on the local business listings for this enterprise, but unless they clean up their customer service at 150 of their worst-rated locations, how much ROI are we really going to be able to deliver? What’s going on at these places?”

Let’s make no bones about this: Your honesty at this critical juncture could mean the difference between survival and closure for the brand.

You need to bring it home to the most senior level person you can reach in the organization that no amount of honest marketing can cover up poor customer service in the era of online reviews. If the brand has fallen to the level of the pharmacy I’ve cited, structural change is an absolute necessity. You can ask the tough questions, ask for an explanation of the bad reviews.

“But I’m just a digital marketer,” you may think. “I’m not in charge of whatever happens offline.”

Think again.

Headlines in retail land are horrid right now:

The mall crisis is secretly morphing into a full-on Armageddon - Business Insider

America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning - Bloomberg

Retail Wreck? Over 1,000 Stores Close in a Single Week - NBC

8 Companies Amazon is Killing - Investopedia

These major retailers have closed more than 5,000 stores in 2017 - Clark.com

If you were a retail brand C-suite and were swallowing these predictions of doom with your daily breakfast, wouldn’t you be looking for inspiration from anyone with genuine insight? And if a marketing agency should make it their business to confront the truth while also being the bearer of some better news, wouldn’t you be ready to listen?

What is the truth? That poor reviews are symptoms smart doctors can use for diagnosis of structural problems. What is the better news? The retail scenario is not nearly as dire as it may seem.

Why let hierarchy and traditional roles hold your agency back? Tesla wouldn’t. Why not roll up your sleeves and step into in-store? Organize and then translate the narrative negative reviews are telling about structural problems for the brand which have resulted in dangerously bad customer service. And then, be prepared to counter corporate inertia born of fear with some eye-opening statistics.

Print and share some good retail tidings

Print your own copy of this infographic to share with clients.

At Moz, we’re working with enterprises to get their basic location data into shape so that they are ready to win their share of the predicted $1.4 trillion in mobile-influenced local sales by 2021, and your agency can use these same numbers to combat indecision and apathy for your retail clients. Look at that second statistic again: 90% of purchases are still happening in physical stores. At Moz, we ask our customers if their data is ready for this. Your agency can ask its clients if their reputations are ready for this, if their employees have what they need to earn the brand’s piece of that 90% action. Great online data + great in-store service = table stakes for retail success.

While I won’t play down the unease that major brand retail closures is understandably causing, I hope I’ve given you the tools to fight the “retail disaster” narrative. 85% more mobile users are searching for things like “Where do I buy that reindeer moss vitamin D3?” than they were just 3 years ago. So long as retail staff is ready to deliver, I see no “apocalypse” here.

Investing time

So, your agency has put in the time to identify a reputation problem severe enough that it appears to be founded in structural deficiencies or policies. Perhaps you’ve used some ORM software to do review sentiment analysis to discover which of your client’s locations are hurting worst, or perhaps you’ve done an initial audit manually. You've communicated the bad news to the most senior-level person you can reach at the company, and you've also shared the statistics that make change seem very worthwhile, begging for a new commitment to in-store excellence. What happens next?

While there are going to be nuances specific to every brand, my bet is that the steps will look like this for most businesses:

C-suites need to invest time in creating a policy which a) abundantly communicates company culture, b) expresses trust in employee initiative, and c) dispenses with needless “chain of command” steps, while d) ensuring that every public facing staffer receives full and ongoing training. A recent study says 62% of new retail hires receive less than 10 hours of training. I’d call even these worrisome numbers optimistic. I worked at 5 retail jobs in my early youth. I’d estimate that I received no more than 1 hour of training at any of them.

Because a chain of command can’t realistically be completely dispensed with in a large organization, store managers must then be allowed the time to communicate the culture, encourage employees to use common sense, define what “common sense” does and doesn’t look like to the company, and, finally, offer essential training.

Employees at every level must be given the time to observe how happy or unhappy customers appear to be at their location, and they must be taught that their observations are of inestimable value to the brand. If an employee suggests a solution to a common consumer complaint, this should be recognized and rewarded.

Finally, customers must be given the time to air their grievances at the time of service, in-person, with accessible, responsive staff. The word “corporate” need never come into most of these conversations unless a major claim is involved. Given that it may cost as much as 7x more to replace an unhappy customer than to keep an existing one happy, employees should be empowered to do business graciously and resolve complaints, in most cases, without escalation.

Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said that “time is money.” While the adage rings true in business, reviews have taught me the flip side — that a lack of time equals less money. Every negative review that cites helpless employees and poor service sounds to my marketing ears like a pocketful of silver dollars rolling down a drain.

The monk says good leaders make the time to communicate culture one-on-one.

Tesla says rules should change if they’re ridiculous.

Chairs should be offered to sick people… where common sense is applied.

Reviews can read like this:

And digital marketers have never known a time quite like this to have the ear of retail, maybe stepping beyond traditional boundaries into the fray of the real world. Maybe making a fundamental difference.

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tainghekhongdaycomvn · 6 years

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Getting Real with Retail: An Agency’s Guide to Inspiring In-Store Excellence

Posted by MiriamEllis

No marketing agency staffer feels good when they see a retail client getting reviews like this on the web.

The genuine pain of retail gone wrong: The elusive cooler, "Corporate," and the man who could hardly stand

“Hi there,” I greeted the staffer at the customer service counter of the big department store. “Where would I find a small cooler?”

“We don’t have any,” he mumbled.

“You don’t have any coolers? Like, an Igloo cooler to take on a picnic to keep things cold?”

“Maybe over there,” he waved his hand in unconcern.

“Hi there,” I tried with more specificity at the locally owned general store the next day. “Where would I find something like a small Igloo cooler to keep things cold on a picnic?”

“I don’t know,” the staffer replied.

“Oh…” I said, uncomfortably.

Why do we all have experiences like this?

Why does the distance between corporate and customer make me feel like the store I’m standing in, and all of its employees, are powerless? Why am I, the customer, left feeling powerless?

So maybe my search for a cooler, my worries about access to reindeer moss, and the laughable customer service I’ve experienced don’t signal “genuine pain.” But this does: