In a current thread about Wal-Mart, the concept of the greeter was mentioned. As I understand it, these are employees who stand inside the doors and… greet customers? Do they fulfill another function, or do they just say hello? Why are they there? How do they increase the profit of the store?
There must be some cultural difference thing going on, 'cause if I went into a big store and someone came up to me unprovoked to welcome me to the store, I’d just be annoyed.
They just stand there and greet you. Nothing else. They are annoying.
They greet you when you come in and sometimes will hand you a shopping cart. They also will check your bags if the exit scanner goes off.
Usually the greeters are retired people trying to get a little extra income.
They are usually older people that just greet people coming in. However, I always got the feeling that they were there to deter shoplifters from leaving that set of doors as well as watching for problems in that part of the store such as the buggy racks. They are also a goodwill gesture to show that Wal-Mart cares about giving jobs for those that are not very employable otherwise.
They say hello, they exclaim how cute the baby is and try to make her laugh (no go, she’s always serious as can be when someone goggles at her), and they often help with getting a cart and gently working traffic flow so no one bashes into us as I’m trying to get the seatbelt fastened. Their job seems to be to put people in a good mood so they buy more. It’s not uncommon for retail stores to require their employees to say hello when someone walks in the door - Wal-Mart is just really big, and they’ve found that having a designated person do so makes sense for them. They tend, at least in our area, as well as in stereotype, to be older “retired” folks, so I don’t imagine it pays much over minimum wage.
I don’t go there much, but I have to say I prefer the Wal-Mart greeter to Target’s two scowling security guards dressed in faux police uniforms who stand at the entrance. For every other part of the shopping experience, I prefer Target.
Maybe someone who works there will have more details.
I used to work Wal-Mart and sometimes had to fill in as greeter when we were busy. In addition to greeting, we were also responsible for checking receipts if the exit scanners were set off or if the customer had something in their cart that was not bagged (like dog food).
Our local grocery chain has started employing greeters too. Personally, I’d prefer if they spent that money on an additional cashier and/or bagger, which always seem to be in short supply.
Sometimes they roll a shopping cart to a convenient position.
You couldn’t be more misinformed. They also put a red dot on items that are being returned. You make their job sound so simplistic!
I always figured they were there to notice and flag “undesirables”.
-Joe
Oh, right, I forgot about that. The red dot tells Customer Service that, yes, you walked in with this camp kitchen that was broken in the box*, and you didn’t merely take another one off the shelf and get a refund for one you didn’t purchase.
So it appears they have some inventory control (aka: loss prevention, aka: prevent people from stealing stuff) purpose, as well. Interesting that they accomplish this through a helpful guise instead of Target’s mean one. Yeah, I know, I’m harping, but I HATE seeing a fake policeman (or a real off duty policeman) lurking around the door when I walk in. Makes me feel jittery and like I want to leave. Obviously, I am the kind of person Wal-Mart executives had in mind when formulating their Greeter image.
*Three times! Three times I get the camp kitchen and three times I get it home and open it to find it broken! Either Coleman sucks (possible) or Wal-Mart has chimpanzees stocking the shelves.
Wal-Mart brought the concept of the greeter to Canada. And yes, greeters are creepy.
If they’d been called checkers, or spotters, or anything else, we would have assumed they had some security function and been pleasantly surprised by how friendly they were. But to call them greeters moves them into the manipulative fake-friendly category. Ugh.
Funny, I don’t go to Wal-Mart much, but at the one I’ve been to maybe a half-dozen times in the past five years, I don’t remember ever encountering a greeter. I wonder how much the stores are allowed to be outside of policy on this.
Don’t forget what could be their most important function: handing out those annoying yellow smiley faces to the kids.
There was a store I used to go to in the city where the greeters checked everyone’s bag, whether the alarm went off or not. Presumably because that store had self check out lanes.
Here’s one more function they serve: they give your kid a Smiley Face sticker. Used to be, they’d just give the kids one. I guess they got some flack for that, maybe from parents whose little precious ones had adhesive allergies or something. These days, they always ask my permission before giving mudgirl a sticker.
Were that the case, Mr. K and I would have to buy our paper towels and toothpaste elsewhere! 
Been there, done that. We’ve decided it’s worth it to unpack the item and give a cursory glance to all the parts, just to reduce the chance of having to return it. If it’s a complicated item, we’ll ask permission. But if it’s something simple, we just carefully open the box and check out the contents. I believe it was Walmart who would receive a returned printer and inside the box would be a brick or something. Then once you get stuck with that, no one will believe that you actually found a brick, rather than a printer in the box.
Generally, I like the Greeters. I also prefer a cheerful hello to a sideways rent-a-cop sneer.
GAH! I was vacationing in the southern US a few years back, and we stopped for breakfast at a Waffle House, IIRC. The waitresses (every damn one of 'em) said, “Good Morning” to every freaking soul who walked in the door. By the time we finished eating, we just wanted to get the hell out of there!
An interesting cultural difference. I would think it impolite if they did not speak.
Pa was the only state on the trip to New England BTW where I couldn’t understand a damn word a guy said. It was in a gas station. He probably couldn’t understand me, either. One cannot help but suggest that the two are connected. 