"I Can Take The Next Customer On Register 10."

     I’m going to switch gears here and talk about how retail stores can improve the way they do business. This problem is the most frustrating and common issue across the board - spanning grocery retail to electronics retail. It’s probably one of the biggest reasons why shopping online has been so popular of late and has spelled doom for more than 1 retailer:
     Long lines at the checkout stands.
     I hear the groans already so I know I’m right. A store has 10 to 20 registers closed but only 2-3 are open. Then there are lines that back up into the aisles and some indignant comedian makes it up to the registers and cracks a joke about having to wait in line for a few minutes. Here’s a tip: the sarcasm isn’t really appreciated and, most likely, the cashier agrees with you. It sucks to wait in line and that’s especially true when all you want to do is buy 1 item, but nobody wants to hear you be a dick.
     NOW, what the retail stores can do, as I promised. Stores need to stop being so concerned with doing business on the cheap. “Spend a little to make a little,” should be etched into the brains of every CEO in America. I know it isn’t ideal to have 5 cashiers standing around when things get slow, but maybe you should have them go out and do other things in the store. Train them to do more than just scan things, perhaps. But every customer will leave the store a bit happier knowing that they didn’t have to wait for 10 minutes and miss the first five minutes of Dancing With The Stars.
     If you have plenty of staff to do the work, more people will be helped, and you’ll sell more. I’ve seen customers who’ve left their shopping cart behind because they had been waiting in a checkout line for several minutes. Think of all the money you could’ve had, no matter the size of the purchase, had they stayed and purchased the products? Spend a little to make a little.
     I’ve found that many stores try to change the appearance of their stores to combat this growing frustration over their lack of staffing. They change the displays or make it seem like you’re family while in their stores. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really mind people being there to sell products as long as they’re not shoving products into my shopping cart. And if you’ve hired the right people for the job, you don’t need to train them or direct them to try and be my friend while I’m there. Telling your employees to be friendlier to the customers makes it seem even more phony than not. You can make your stores as pretty and welcoming as you want but it will always boil down to being able to get out fast once they find what they’re looking for.
     For those businesses that are some of the top-earning businesses in America, paying for more employees shouldn’t be too difficult. Instead of buying that second corporate jet, how about you hire a few hundred more employees? Instead of opening ten new stores every year, how about you focus on making the stores you do have the best you can? As much as I used to love McDonald’s, I don’t need one opened two blocks down from another one. Have your stores staffed properly and it’ll go a long way with people.
     Solving the cashier issue can be fixed by avoiding the need to hire more if cashiers received more hours. Lots of cashiers are only part-time and need to work more than one job just to get by. If a company just made more of those part-timers full-timers, than there’d be more overlap. You wouldn’t need to hire more - just pay a few dollars more per employee if that’s what you prefer to do.
     What bugs me is when I’m asked to cashier as a back-up when they’re low on help. I have my own job to get done and pulling me away from that task will only frustrate customers in other ways. Shuffling staff around from one department to the front to cashier is not a sustainable practice. This practice of shuffling staff around will most likely be revisited again, but for now, I shall leave it at that. Suffice it to say, staffing properly would just solve so many problems for a retailer who is fighting to keep business at the stores and away from Amazon or other online retailers.
     I’d write more in-depth on this issue but if you’ll excuse me, Dancing With The Stars will be on soon.
     More soon from the frontlines…