I wish I could page my dad to this thread. He’s coming up on 34 years of owning a general store and would generally agree with you–although he’d also point out that once a person’s been in 3-4 times, you should know what friendliness level they want (I don’t know how he kept thousands of customers straight, but he does.).
In my experience, it’s not the “Can I help you?” that bugs me; it’s the forced cheerfulness of every employee saying hi and asking how I am and so on. I understand completely that it’s upper management who requires it (I spent my time in Retail Hell!), but it’s just annoying.
At least now, I know that I have to OP to thank for getting Food Lion to stop that damned practice of the cashiers turning around to greet every person who walked through the doors.
Thanks, FairyChatMom! 
At Kmart they would deliberately “understaff” – just barely enough people to get by, in order to save money. It fucking sucked.
Is that why there’s 20 checkout lanes, but only three of them are ever open at one time?
I have two semi-random observations:
(1)
Dress Barn is one of my favorite clothing stores so I shop there more often than elsewhere. Seems like about every other time, this is my experience: I’m greeted at the door by a perky salesperson who introduces herself, asks my name, shakes my hand, and tells me about the sales today. OK, a little much, but as has been observed, she’s doing her job. So then she tells me to let her know if I need anything. OK, great. I make some selections, and Suzie Salesperson opens a dressing room for me. I try on my items and discover that I need another size for some of them. Cool, Suzie can get them for me so I don’t have to reassemble myself to be decent for the trek across the store, and she probably knows where the stuff is. Except that when I peek out the door, Suzie is nowhere to be seen, even after a few minutes’ wait. Neither can I snag any other clerk’s attention. So I assemble myself and find my own way across the store to make my exchanges, and hope nobody swipes my purse while I’m out. Hey thanks, Suzie.
I understand that sometimes I’ll have to get a different size myself. But if Suzie is going to fall over over herself telling me how helpful she’s going to be, she could at least, you know, follow up.
(2)
I’m at Barnes & Noble and decide I want a chai latte for the road. I’ve already had one (short) today, at a Starbucks, and since I’m having a second one, I’m limiting myself to another short (which is not listed on the menu, but you can get one if you ask). I know from past experience that the B&N Cafes are not technically Starbucks stores (from previous experience when I tried to use my Starbucks card there), which is fine. However, they have the Starbucks logo everywhere and the menu is extremely similar, with much of the same terminology, layout, etc.
So I get to the register and ask for a short chai latte, and I get a reply of, “We don’t have a short. We’re not Starbucks.”
I may be projecting, but I swear there was just the teeniest bit of snark in that bolded bit.
Well, I really didn’t want a larger size, so I just said, “Oh . . . um . . . well, I really only wanted a short, so I guess I’ll pass, then.” and I left.
But about 2 seconds after I was out the door, I wished I had (politely) addressed that comment. They have the Starbucks theme plastered all over everything, so is it really so unreasonable to think that they might follow the Starbucks model and have a short size?
I ended up going to Starbucks again to get my short, and as I was leaving, the place was pretty empty and an employee was emptying the trash (i.e. not waiting on customers), so I thought I’d tell her the story. She kid of tsked along with me and agreed that it was kind of rude – and apologized! I said, “Pfft, it’s not YOUR fault!” and that I thought it was just kind of weird and rude.
Pretty much.
I just returned from a busy Memorial Day Saturday at work and we had all 11 lanes open (that’s every one we have), both customer service registers open, and every self checkout open. Does that happen very often? No. But just because you have never seen it does not mean that all the registers are never all open. Or do you hang out at the store all the time to check?
Please people, I know shopping can be frustrating. I am sincerely trying to help. The individuals who work for me on the Front End are trained to give good customer service because we believe that this will directly lead to maximum profits. Nothing is wrong with that. Our profit sharing checks have remained good throughout the recession. We must be doing something right for some people. Most of our customers today were friendly and problems were easily overcome.
What’s wrong with a little forced cheerfulness anyway? Do you really want your doctor to be cranky over your health concerns, or the postman to tell you off because you get too many catalogs, or for the bartender to roll his eyes at your order of cheap beer? Sure it can sometimes be over the top, but most common nicities are not especially grating to the majority of people. And it sure beats rudeness.
Or is it that you want your retail employee to not be so happy and cheerful since he/she has such a crummy job in your eyes that the smile must be fake, the friendliness forced, and behind every greeting must certainly be a pathetic cry of helplessness and despair?
The max lanes are for max population density occasions. Every store does it regardless of size.
Heck, my dad’s store does it (two lanes, only one open unless it’s Christmas Eve or some similarly major last-minute-food-buying holiday.)
I believe it’s customary for SDMB retail threads to make it to the third page before this line of argument comes out.
Ok, fair enough. I’m sure most people see retail workers as fellow human beings no more or less than they see various others they encounter during the mundane course of a day. We all participate in retail in some fashion or another, so the retail experience is something we can all easily share a laugh about, or a cry, or a rant.
But it is strange to me that the retail experience seems to produce more actual in-your-face and bizarre out-of-proportion behavior than other minor common irks.
I mean, when I read through an average month’s “mini-rants” thread, part of the fun is saying, “Hey, I agree with that. That bugs me too!” But most of those rants actually only occurred in the minds of the posters. These folks didn’t really yell at the co-worker who hums at his desk too loud or the movie patrons giggling too much during the show.
There’s a general agreement that being anonymous in a car makes road rage more likely. What is it about retail that seems to make some people more comfortable with “retail rage”…of actually ranting over trivial issues to the faces of the workers in the stores?
Exactly :nodding: What happens is that staffing, especially up by the registers, is based on the previous week’s sales. Most supermarket chains have some sort of computer program that tracks not only the sales, but how many people went through the registers at X time as opposed to Y time. It’s even broken down further into how many units of X were sold in Y time period.
All those figures are further broken down into how much $ the store took in on what day and how much per hour. By looking at this, as a manager, for example, you can deduce that Sunday afternoon is your busiest time, so therefore every register should be fully staffed at that time – ergo, you schedule accordingly.
Wednesday mornings? Not so much. According to the sales figures you can get by with one cashier until noontime, say.
Same holds true for other departments, btw.
It’s also a universal truth in retail that one should save $ wherever possible. Business is slow? Send employees home.
I think it’s the universality of the situation – a collective experience, if you will. Everybody has encountered the subject of this thread at some point.
We might look at it as trivial. I’m pretty sure you and I could both point out IRL people who would take this topic seriously (actually I’m thinking of 4 regular customers off the top of my head who have complained about this exact topic to management!)
Plus this is The Pit. It’s where you rant, no matter how trivial the subject 
Oh! I think I’ve had a bit of a revelation here. Me in Florida in January 2002, out to buy clothes because it was so much colder than I’d expected, wearing baggy clothes loaned to me by a friend because I had nothing warmer, I was followed around the store by a woman asking me ever-more intrusive questions. Maybe she thought I was a shoplifter. Or a terrorist. :eek:
Yes to all of that. At least with those I’ve known for a while - with others I’d expect neutrality.
My postman knows my dog’s name and has been known to stop me in the street and hand me my mail. He also knocked on my door one day to say ‘I notice you receive a lot of small signed packages*; shall I just sign them for you?’ meaning that he could put them through the door without waiting for me to answer, but also that the parcel would definitely be there even if I was out. Win-win.
That’s service. (He got promoted).
I live opposite a supermarket and am in there at least once a day. The regular staff there greet me in a friendly way and we chat about our day as much as the checkout time allows. The new staff just smile at me and me at them and nothing else, because nothing else is required. I’m on a friendly acquaintance basis with the regular staff, but the new staff are strangers right now, so we’re just silently civil until we actually have a normal human acquaintanship.
Forced cheerfulness is not required. Civility is. There’s a difference.
If people never see extra checkouts open but you often see workers sitting at empty checkouts, that’s a sign to management that the checkouts aren’t open at the right times.
Anyway, feel free to rant - customer rant about the service, service people rant about the customers; it’s part of the role.
*DVDs for work. Nothing contraband. Sorry.
She thought you were a shoplifter. You probably weren’t exactly the usual customer for the store, which is…odd. Combine that with the baggy clothes, and she was certain that you were a shoplifter.
Well, I’m not the usual customer in that I’m English, but otherwise it was just the clothes. She shepherded me out.
Thing was, I actually had a lot of cash (well, a few hundred dollars - this was not a high-end store) to spare for clothes; I had a bit of spare cash anyway, and had gone down in weight so much that nothing I owned fit me - I needed to re-buy everything I owned, pretty much.
Kinda felt like Pretty Woman except it ended with us going to a Goodwil store because my friend didn’t know anywhere else open late enough and we were cold.
I had the same experience at Firehouse Subs, with all the snark but with an implied rather than explicit “we’re not Subway”.
I order a 6 inch sub and they say they only have medium and larges (medium being 8 inches), which was said with a glee undeserved by me since I did check to see the labels: no labels saying Medium, 8", or anything, just two different prices beside each sub. Then when I wait while they make the sub, they say “go to your table and we’ll call you when it’s ready.” Say what you will about Subway, I like seeing that my sub is made correctly.
I made the mistake of going back to a different Firehouse a few months later. Still no labels to remind me of the magic words I should say to avoid a snarky correction. So I order a “…small?” but was sharply corrected to Medium. Thankfully I did not need to be reminded that they are expert submarine craftsmen so did not try to hover over them while they plied their trade.
Then when it came time to pay I asked “do you take Discover?” And they answered “We take all major credit cards!” Ummmm, that doesn’t answer my question. At the time (~5-6 years ago) not everyone considered Discover a major credit card. But apparently I was supposed to magically understand that Firehouse thought that Discover was a major credit card.
Needless to say I haven’t been back to them.
For the same reason my grandmother (generally a nice person otherwise) could be an absolute ass to waitstaff at TGIFs or a boss is an ass to his employees.
You see, there is a pecking order here. Customers and those who are there to SERVE them.
And all the “team-building” exercise crap and other workplace customs and rules that employees rant about are created based on perceived enhancement to the bottom line, not employee satisfaction.
It remains true that businesses make lousy decisions all the time, sometimes because they jump on a bandwagon or follow a fad that popular consultants have generated.
And they go out of business because of those decisions.
There’s nothing wrong with businesses making decisions based on how they enhance the bottom line. Our store sells Pepsi not because we want to add a certain cola-zest to life of our customers, but to make a profit.
If business decisions are poor, the business suffers. That’s the beauty of the system.
Many companies realize that a happier work environment makes for more productivity and ultimately more profits. Sometimes the efforts are misguided and don’t generate the desired results, sometimes the decisions are good and profits increase. My wife actually likes the “team-building” exercises at her job.
There may be some backlash to the “super-friendly” retailers from customers who want to be left alone, but many retail businesses are achieving better profits using the “friendly” method…and therefore other retailers are jumping on the bandwagon.
I think it’s becoming an issue of consumer fatigue. It is becoming very difficult to approach a customer for any reason lately without getting a snappy, nasty response. I blame this partially on the topic of this thread. Where I work my day job, it’s much like a botanical garden you can shop in filled with waterfalls, big trees, boulders, and different sections of landscape materials. It’s a big place, and it’s easy to miss one of the few people staffing it during slow season. I make it a point to greet the customers so that they know someone is actually here to assist them. Usually when they get nasty, I just gloss over it with: “That’s fine, we don’t work on commission here, have fun looking around, I’m just letting you know there is someone here to answer any questions you might have.” Then I just leave 'em be. Of course this is a small family run business not a corporate conglomerate, so YMMMV. I’ve even had a few apologize to me and mention that they are just tired of being jumped on everywhere they shop.