Why Can’t Your Competitor Match Your Price? Answer Me!

I’ve been in retail long enough to be on the receiving end of my fair share of oddball complaints.  You know the ones.  The people who complain that you won’t give him or her a specific television even though you don’t have any in your store and there’s nothing you can do about it yourself.  The people who complain that the grapefruit your store received is of mediocre quality and want to know why you, personally, brought them in (despite having nothing to do with the shipments).  The people who complain just for the sake of complaining.  Kind of like bloggers!  (Hey, wait a second…)

A few days ago, during the winter storm that nearly three-fourths of the country went through, I was helping a woman with a television.  She was looking for the cheapest product you could find and despite finding a cheap television set, she wanted to “look around” just because we didn’t have that exact one in stock to give her.  I had to prevent myself from giving a dumbfounded glance outside the doors as the falling snow turned everything white outside.  Hey, if she wanted to drive around in THAT, be my guest.  She must’ve REALLY needed to watch TV.
I went back to helping the other people who were also crazy enough to go shopping for non-essentials during a winter storm.  Fast-forward several minutes when we received a phone call on the department phone.  I just happened to be the one nearby and reluctantly answered.  The same woman who was “just looking” was calling from a competitor of ours.  She wanted to know why the price of the television online was different from the price of the television in the store.  It happens.  I went online but noticed that she was wrong about the price being different – she was just looking at a different model.
For some reason, this wasn’t good enough because this competitor of ours had the TV in-stock and was going to match our price for the same model but because the website was supposedly not showing the right price – which it was – they weren’t going to give her the price.  Needless to say, at this point I was confused.  I apologized for the supposed lack of information needed for our competitor to steal our sale away but what else could I do?  Obviously, this apology was not enough for her.  It’s not like it was my responsibility for them to sell her a product at the price she wanted.
In all of my years, I’ve never had anyone complain that another company I didn’t even work for wouldn’t give the customer the price we were offering them.  Is that a thing?  Anyone out there have something similar happen to them?  Has anyone gone to a Ford dealership, asked for a product at a price, then gone to a VW dealership, asked for a product at a price, and then called the Ford dealership because the VW dealership wouldn’t give you the same price as the Ford dealership?  Are people really in need to bitch that much that they have nothing better to do than to complain when it won’t even solve a thing?
If any of the answers to those questions was a “yes”, then in the words of Bill Engvall, “Here’s your sign…”
Does anyone have a particularly amazing complaint that had nothing to do with anything you had control over?  Please, if you could top this, I’d love to hear how hilariously stupid it is.
More soon from the frontlines...

Competition Comes Knocking

     Throughout both my years in grocery and electronics retail I’ve had to deal with new stores that vie for your customer base.  Some tend to have a bigger impact on the scene than others.  Some fizzle out quicker than others.  However, the same reaction to news of an upcoming competitor always takes place each time.  The complete and total meltdown.

     It’s not that bad, in reality, but the people running the store, the district, the company, tend to make you feel that way.  It can generally start with the company devising ways to find out what this newcomer is all about.  People get sent into their stores to do a little snooping around and see what’s working for them and what’s not.  This can sometimes lead to the, “Oh, shit, that’s what we should be doing!” response that most management people have.  This can be a disastrous scenario because in some cases, the established store that feels threatened by the newcomer will sometimes drastically change things about themselves to mimic the newcomer.  I can understand the instinct to do this but it’s a terrible idea, in my opinion.

     First of all, people are shopping at your store because you’re obviously doing something right.  In this economy, if you haven’t gone into bankruptcy or closed down completely, it’s a miracle and you should keep on keepin’ on.  If you are changing key things about yourself to steal someone else’s thunder, then you’re changing the reasons people come into your store.  If they wanted to shop at store X, then they’ll shop at store X instead of trying to get the exact experience at store Y.  Do you go into a Target and think, “Man, this is a pleasant place to shop but why isn’t it more like K-Mart?”  If you wanted to shop at K-Mart, shop at K-Mart.  There was a pretty well-known store that closed their doors a few years back and people at my company credited to the fact that they were playing catch-up to us.  They changed different aspects about themselves but just couldn’t get traction.  Now, I don’t know if they’d still be in business had they just amplified the things they do well instead of trying to be like us, but at least they could close down knowing they played the game on their terms.

     Now comes the part where the store you work at implements the changes.  Sadly, the things they’re trying to change are the things that nobody cares about.  They’ll worry about too much signage when they should really worry about adequate staffing.  They’ll see workers’ desks and just see clutter when they should focus on making sure the products on their shelves are in stock.  They’ll remove tile flooring and lay carpeting down to make things look more elegant when they should fix the leaking roof or the bathroom that constantly smells like crap.  Yet, they want to take the easy way out of improving their company.  As we all know, the cheap and easy way out is always the best option, right?

     Good luck trying to convince management in your store that they’re focused on the wrong things, too.  I totally understand that some changes are out of their hands.  They don’t control the amount of money they have to hire people for example.  Yet, people just seem content to not question anything and just continue to go along to get along.  It’s maddening.  So all you can do, as an employee, is stand by and watch as the gong show plays out all around you.

     For months in advance, the sentiment of management about the approaching doom that is a new business coming into town can be a bit disappointing, to say the least.  In private, the management, which should be rallying the morale of the workers, will look at you with wide-eyed horror as they say to you how worried they are about the new competitor.  It’s as if they think we’re all going to be out of jobs within six months.  To me, this worriment is just proof that they don’t have faith in their own company’s ability to compete and also their employees’ ability to compete.  Only those who worry about a competitor coming in are those who think that something is wrong with the way they’re doing things.  Why else be so nervous about 1 new store being added to the mix?  It’s not like ours is the only company in the city that sells the products that are on our shelves.  If you think this competitor is such a threat and you say things like, “I don’t know what we’re going to do…,” (which I’ve heard from management in the past) then why hire the people you’ve hired?  That’s what’s annoying to me about the messages being spread from management when new competitors arrive.  To the workers they project confidence in the staffing they have but in private a lot of them seem to have no faith in their people.

     Personally, I don’t worry at all whenever a new store opens in the area.  I have faith in my coworkers and the company I work for to know that we’ll be fine.  Our business might hurt but that’s the nature of things.  We’ve stolen customers away from multiple competitors for years and we’ll continue to do so, just like they’ll do with our customers.  It’s the nature of retail.  If you can’t handle the other kids on the block, you might as well pack up your shit and go home.  And that’s life, really – you can either hold firm and believe in yourself and know that you can handle challenge or you can just give up and never get anywhere in life.

     More soon from the frontlines...