LA-LA-LA I Can’t Hear You!!!

Another entry in under a month!  Not that I’m looking for people to pat me on the back, but if you want to I won’t stop you.

I made this blog with the intention of solving retail problems when and where I could.  I try to cure all of life’s ills for those of you who are reading this (probably people with insomnia).

Today’s lesson is a discussion on regression.  As a person who may or may not be somewhere in the age range of 18 to 75 (hey, I have to keep this anonymous, after all), I like to think that I have achieved some measure of maturity.  I say this in the humblest of ways because as someone with said maturity, I see an awful lot of other people who are supposedly considered adults come into my store with zero maturity.  Perhaps I fell into a sort of inverse universe where the older you get, the more immature you are?  Those that are born infants are regarded as wise sages (which, if you look at any random parent’s Facebook page isn’t that far off from the truth)?

The point being, I – at whatever age I may be, should not act like more of an adult than those who are the same age or older than I am.  Those who come in wearing business attire should not seem less mature than the guy wearing a work uniform with their name embroidered on it.  You’re the one who has supposedly gotten farther in life (further?  Hold on, I have to go check… I’ve returned and it appears that it doesn’t matter according to Grammar Girl.  So suck it!) and as someone who has gotten farther in life, you shouldn’t be acting like you’re still in grade school.

“An example, please,” you say?  Okay then.

Just the other day a customer came into the store.  This customer had a product of hers worked on by our company but then called us and accused us of doing something we didn’t.  Trust me when I say that we didn’t do anything.  I’m not someone who blindly follows the company I work for for no reason.  If we fucked up I’d be the first to admit it.

Anyway!

The customer made some ridiculous claim and wanted to speak to the manager that was on duty.  By this point, everyone in the store knew what the manager was walking into on this phone call and everyone had some sort of quip at the ready. Oh, to be a fly on that wall during that conversation!  Wait, that doesn’t work in this context.  Oh, to be the NSA listening in on that conversation!

The phone call did not go the way the customer wanted because the manager, while being pretty restrained at the ridiculous accusations the customer was slinging, didn’t have the answers he was looking for.  With the conversation coming to a close, we figured that that was that.

Fast-forward a short time later in the day when a lady enters the store.  She was probably in her 40s and had the stature of someone who probably got what they wanted in most aspects of her daily life, and when that didn’t happen, she probably demanded she get her way.  I was nearby and caught the vague conversation she was having with our cashier.  She wanted to speak to the actual manager of the store but he was not in for the day.  In the absence of the store manager, I got the only other manager we had at the time – the one that had taken the call earlier (I shall call this person Aaron).

If there is anyone you want to handle your issue if you are a customer that comes into our store, it is Aaron.  He is that one employee that will generally listen to your stupid issues or complaints with the patience of Buddha.  As long as you’re not swearing, being physically violent, or demeaning his workers, Aaron will talk to you until the store closes.  I truly do not know how he does it.  If I didn’t know him any better, I’d swear it was a heavy combination of alcohol and drugs.  Patience of the Buddha.

Aaron came up to the customer and almost immediately the two of them realized who the other person standing in front of them was.  This did not please the customer at all.  Aaron couldn’t even attempt to talk to her or to ask her any questions at all about her interaction with our employees because the woman kept saying that she didn’t want to hear anything he had to say.  To be clear, up to this point, he had barely said anything other than his name and asked what he could do for her.  She refused to talk to him, shook her head, turned around, and repeated something along the lines of, “You’re still talking!”  By now, she had clasped both hands over her ears while shouting the same, “You’re still talking!” line until she was squarely out of the store.

Really?  You don’t like the fact that your issue was ludicrous, and when we tried to politely tell you that the complaint you had had no merit, your solution is to storm off like a child with your ears covered?

Do you see what I mean?  I wish this was a single instance of infantile behavior that our customers have displayed.  This is a reoccurring theme it feels like and while I could go on, I think this is enough for one entry.

Since I am trying to solve the ills of the retail world, this one is probably pretty straightforward.  If you’re a customer, be a little less of an overgrown infant.  It won’t get you what you want and all it will do will embarrass you in the eyes of every single employee in the store.  I hate looking like a fool in front of 1 person let alone a store full of people.  Who knows?  You might just get what you wanted in the first place.  And if you’re an employee, you should do what I sometimes do:  picture the customer’s head superimposed on a baby’s body.  It will make having to listen to their insanity a bit more tolerable.  Good luck!

Does anyone else have a favorite example of customers acting like children?  Please feel free to share!

More soon from the frontlines…

If You Have A Group Of Friends And No One Is An Asshole, Chances Are You’re The Asshole

     Wow.  Over a year since my last post.  For those of you who find my rambling stories amusing, I apologize for the absence, but you know what they say about absences and the heart.  I just have not been feeling very creatively inspired for a very long time and that needs to stop right here and right now.  So, let’s get into it, shall we?
     One topic I wanted to bring up is the amazing ability customers possess to shoot themselves in the foot.  Does this ever happen where you work?  A customer has an issue that needs resolution but before anyone can even attempt to fix it, they erupt into a ball of rage at anyone they feel is to blame for their predicament.  It happens at least once a week where I work.  I don’t know how much of an exaggeration that is, but if it is an exaggeration, it’s not by much.  Thankfully, since I’ve been in the warehouse and haven’t had to deal with many customer issues, I haven’t had to have anyone flip out on me.  I just get the benefit of watching grown adults whine about first world problems like little children.  Good times.

     This scenario usually plays out thusly:

     The customer comes in because of some issue with something they purchased.

     The customer explains said issue to lowly employee (poor sap #1).  This is usually followed by a statement about what they would like to see happen to keep them happy.

     The lowly employee has to explain why the issue happened.  At this point, the lowly employee has to either tell the customer they can’t do anything for them under the rules of their company OR presents a resolution that the customer doesn’t like.

     The customer’s frustration – and the frequency with which they huff and shift their weight from leg to leg and back again – increases.  The customer then repeats the only acceptable resolution to their situation (the one that won’t happen).

     The lowly employee repeats their options.

     The customer requests to speak to their supervisor (poor sap #2).  Really, they want the CEO of the company but barring that, they’ll settle for the store GM.  They really get someone one or two steps below the GM.

     The lowly employee walks off to get their supervisor (probably someone just slightly higher up on the food chain whose work life can be summed up with the equation: “shit I have to deal with > the money I’m paid”).

     The supervisor might have to first explain that they’re either a direct supervisor or “one of the managers” when the customer asks if they are THE manager.  Carrying on, the supervisor repeats the options, backing up what lowly employee #1 said, which only infuriates the customer further.

     The customer gets worked up and now demands the GM so the supervisor pages for a manager (sometimes the actual GM, buuuuuut sometimes not) to come over.

     The manager (whose work life can be summed up with the equation: “shit I have to deal with < the money I’m paid < complaining I’ll do about how the money isn’t THAT much better than the lowly employee #1”) comes over.  NOW, this manager might be open-minded and might be willing to listen to the customer.  Maybe the manager isn’t.  The point is, the customer probably won’t ever find out which way this manager is leaning toward because once the manager walks up and says, “Is there something I can help with?” the customer starts to dig into him/her.

     This explosion will probably include expletives about the other two poor saps that wouldn’t help them.  Insider tip: calling employees that work for that manager “idiots” or “fuckers” or the like probably won’t go over well.  Anyway.

     The manager will then either ask the customer to step off to the side (a mark of a very calm & collected person in the retail world!) or to leave the building (a.k.a.: “get the fuck out of my sight you worthless piece of crap, I don’t have time to deal with you trying to return a remote control from a year ago.”).

     This is where it can diverge into very different outcomes.

     Rarely, the customer will pick the option to go with the manager to calm down long enough for the two parties to come to an understanding and maybe a resolution can be reached or maybe not.

     Generally, the more entertaining of the two options will occur.  The customer will tell the manager that they won’t go anywhere followed by an even more expletive-laced diatribe about everyone they ever had to talk to at the store and how they will never shop their again and why the company is destined to go out of business and go fuck yourselves while you’re at it, thank you very much.  Keep in mind, this all happens before the manager can even decide if they want to override whatever his employees told this customer before he/she even showed up.  The manager can’t even hear the customer’s side of the story and only hears how the customer believes the manager should go fuck himself/herself.

     At this point, they’re either ushered out by security or by the police depending on how long and how loud the expletives lasted.  If you’re lucky, the customer will throw whatever they were trying to return across the building.  One time, I saw a guy punch a stop sign as he stormed out of the store.  True story!  Perhaps he thought the stop sign was telling him to stop being a d-bag?

     Moral of the story?  Don’t be a d-bag because you might just get what you wanted in the first place.  I guess this moral can be applied to nearly anything you do in life if you think about it.  Hey, what do you want from me?  Not all of my stories have profound solutions.  This IS my first entry in over a year, after all.  Give me a break.

     More soon from the frontlines...

“If You Could Reapply For A Second Time For The Same Position… That’d Be Grrrreat.”

I know!  Another gap in posting.  But I am back… again!

The past few weeks have been quite the interesting experience at my job.  I’ll have to break this down into two posts perhaps but I’ll just write about what’s affecting me directly in this entry.

It actually began several months ago.  My company has decided to change the layout of my department and because of that, I had to reapply for the same exact position I’ve been in for the previous few years.  Nothing was changing about the position but because they were redoing the structure of that aspect of the business, I had to prove my worthiness to stay on (I guess).  That was kind of insulting, in my opinion, but whatever.  My supervisor was a good guy and his manager had known me for most of my career there so it wasn’t as if I was overly worried about getting hired.

I go for the interview and a short while later, the manager – let’s call this person Lester – contacted me to tell me that I would be staying on in the department but since the reorganization was taking place, there was only one full-time position available.  Doesn’t sound too bad but there were two full-timers vying for the position – a coworker and myself.  We had been under the impression that there were two full-time positions but it turns out we were wrong.  Long story short, my coworker took an assistant supervisor position that was available in the reorganized department and I took the full-time spot.  That was last August.

My supervisor, meanwhile, was told he wouldn’t be staying on when they redid the department and so we got a new supervisor around September of 2013.  Besides the changing of the supervisors, however, nothing changed.  My coworker who got the promotion experienced no change in duties and pay (as far as I know).  It was basically all paperwork.

Fast-forward to around January and we were told that we would have to re-apply AGAIN for our spots.  Our department would be finally making the real reorganized structure they had been laying out since last fall: now there would be different pay structures, different bonuses, different uniforms, etc., etc.  Now our interviews would be with our new supervisor (who we had only known for a few months and who came in with his own way of doing things).  There was nothing wrong with the new supervisor but he had more of a used car salesman mentality and that was different from how we had been trained to interact with our customers, which seemed to be good enough for our department to hit our revenue goals for most of my time in the store.

Our newest part-timer was determined to stay on in the department and began memorizing everything he/she could.  In just a few short weeks, he/she had absorbed as much product knowledge as he/she could.  It was quite impressive and he/she blew me away.  I, however, had more of a blasé attitude about the whole thing.  I had been there for years and if I got the spot, great.  If I didn’t, whatever.  I kind of was looking for an excuse to do something else, I guess.

I mean, I knew my products and I knew how to talk to customers and I knew how to fix most of my own issues.  In my time at this job, I even had managers who didn’t want to deal with my department’s customer issues come to me to resolve problems.  I wasn’t the best but I seemed to be fairly relied upon and looked upon favorably by most of my store’s managers through the years.  So, I was probably the most relaxed person going into these new interviews out of everyone.

(I should point out that I did need a job but I wouldn’t have been devastated if I didn’t get hired on.)

The new interviews were quickly approaching.  Things were getting serious now.  However, even before we were supposed to interview with our supervisor, my newest part-timer was told that he/she was going to have a second interview at another store with other department managers and corporate managers.  He/she was the only one who was told about such a meeting.  The other full-timer and myself were not.  When we went in for our first interview nothing was mentioned about a second interview.  Other than that, my interview went swimmingly.

A week passed with no word on if I got the spot.  I was leaving on a vacation the following week and just before I left the part-timer told me that he/she got a spot on the new team (which was awesome for him/her.  I was totally excited for him/her because he/she deserved it.).  Yet, no word still about my situation, but I wasn’t completely stupid.  I knew as soon as the part-timer got their second interview BEFORE even having their first and the rest of us didn’t receive the same that we didn’t get on the new team.

I wasn’t upset about the situation but I felt more insulted than anything.  For one thing, my supervisor knew I was going on vacation but I still hadn’t heard any word about the application.  Then you schedule a secondary interview with our coworker before their first interview and you don’t think it’d look suspicious to the rest of us?  Plus, like I said, we were doing pretty good as a team month after month.  We were part of the reason the company felt they should reorganize the department structure thanks to how good we were doing.  So we’re good enough to warrant a restructure but not good enough to stay on?

I go on vacation and while I’m on vacation, I hear that the part-timer was the only one who got hired on to stay in the department.  Not that anyone knew if I got a spot but I was 99% sure I hadn’t.  I came back from vacation and even though I had been back for three days and the first day of training for the part-timer was the following day, I still hadn’t heard anything from my supervisor.

Finally, I had to TEXT my supervisor to find out.  He told me to call him and over the phone he told me that there was a lot of talented competition and that I wouldn’t be staying on in the department.  I guess I handled it better than most since, like I’ve said again and again, I knew this was happening for weeks by this point and I’m not stupid.  I had been thinking about what I wanted to say to my supervisor but when the time came to actually receive the news, I thought, “What’s the point?”  The decision had been made and my coworker who hadn’t received a spot had been sticking it to the supervisor enough for the both of us.  It was best to just move on.  And that was that.  It was pretty disappointing that my supervisor couldn’t have the spine to tell me to my face if I got the spot or not but HEY, that’s the kind of new management my company wanted for the reorganization.  Hope that works out for them (since that probably didn’t come across in text – that was supposed to be sarcasm).

Since then I’ve actually never been happier going into work.  There’s a great freedom in knowing I won’t have to deal with the same issues and the same people and the same questions day after day.  I can handle the grumpy customers better and I just go in and do what I can but I don’t stress about stupid bullshit any more.  I do have options other than termination but I’ll get into that in another entry.  I’ll also get more into how I’m feeling as my time in the department is coming to a close in another entry.  I’ll also talk about the fallout from the shake-up in another entry.  This has been long enough.  Suffice it to say, the bumbling rollout of this transition – from last fall to now – is pretty typical of my company’s rollouts.  They seem incapable of doing anything coherently.  It’s truly an amazing feat for such a large company.

More soon from the frontlines...

The Only Way Out Of Retail

That line, “The only way out of here is in a box,” – or some variation of it – is used in movies all the time but I think that it could easily be placed at the top of every application for every retail job.  And that’s because, for an alarming amount of people, that seems to be the only way out of retail.  I know that sounds like a joke but I don’t mean it to be.
In the last year alone I’ve heard about somebody who worked at several of our stores dying from a heart attack either while on the clock or as he was leaving from work.  I’m not 100% sure on the particulars surrounding the event.  Everyone in the store who knew about it kept talking about that.  It was our greatest fear – to die wearing a shirt with a nametag on it.  A few of us even joked about how we would rip our shirts off if we ever felt a heart attack coming while on the job.  We didn’t want the last minutes of our lives to be with our job’s invisible collar around our neck.
Then just recently, our own store had a near scare.  One of our own employees suffered a heart attack outside of work.  Thankfully, the guy is doing okay so far.  Tough bastard.  But to think that this guy had a family and suffered a heart attack during the holidays really gives you the willies.  This is somebody I’ve seen on a near daily basis and have spent countless hours shooting the shit and griping about the stresses of work with.  I couldn’t comprehend it.  My brain could not wrap itself around the idea of somebody around my own age lying in a hospital bed from a heart attack.  I don’t believe in Christmas miracles but I’m damn glad he’s recovering because not everyone is as lucky.
This all seems like a running theme in the world of retail.  I know that’s just life and everyone dies – don’t get me wrong, but it just seems like something about working in retail is conducive to heart attacks.  Stress is a natural part of the retail world and everyone feels it.  From the customers complaining just for the sake of complaining to the customers who are too lazy to read the print on the tags so they come to interrupt your work so you can read it for them.  Maybe it’s the irregular schedules for most of the hourly employees, who are thus unable to plan anything else in their lives.  Or the schedules that change at the last minute without any notification – plans be damned.  Perhaps, it’s the long and demanding hours during the holidays that simultaneously put even more stress on employees who have to miss out on family time.  The seemingly increasing amount of work placed on a smaller and smaller workforce as companies try to squeak by without having to increase their payroll.  Or how about having the smarter employees having to pick up the slack from the idiot employees that the management deemed worthy of hiring?  That one is my personal favorite.
This doesn’t even take into account the poor eating and drinking habits most of the workforce partakes in.  Energy drink companies should give each employee a free case of their products at the holidays for all the business we generate for their companies.  How else are most employees supposed to stay awake on Thanksgiving night when they have to work from ten o’clock to six o’clock the next morning, only to return at noon to start another eight hour shift?  Then there are the late night inventory shifts that end at two in the morning but see some employees return seven hours later to open the store.  The needle full of adrenaline to the heart in Pulp Fiction likely got its inspiration from retail workers.
Then there are the endless amounts of fast food joints conveniently located around my job that almost everyone goes to for lunch breaks.  I feel like I’m one of the few who brings their own food from home as much as I can.  I see what all that fast food is doing to the bodies of many coworkers and I want to avoid health issues as much as possible.  But convenience is typically the way most people lean and when you only get a half hour lunch break – if you’re lucky – then fast food it is!  All that fatty food clogging your arteries while the stresses of your job slowly build and build and build cannot be good for the body.
Sure, I know we don’t perform brain surgery at our jobs, but when you’re getting paid the amount of money we get while doing all the work expected of you by no fewer than five different people on a daily basis, it can feel like it.  Okay, I’m still being a bit hyperbolic, but you catch my drift.
So, in my ever-constant attempt to come up with solutions to my daily rants, where do we go from here?  I doubt companies are going to hire enough staff to do the work that they think we can accomplish.  I doubt our pay will all magically increase and I doubt the hours will change.  I also highly doubt customers will start thinking for themselves and solve their easy questions on their own or keep their petty complaints to themselves without raising a ruckus.
So, I ask again, where do we go from here?
No, seriously, where do we go from here?  Because I’m actually at a loss for ideas.  I just hope we can all make it out of here alive and not in a box.  Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with something by the next post.  If you’ll excuse me, I have to go make a cup of coffee before work.
More soon from the frontlines...

Let's Be Friends! ...Or Not!

     In my time in retail I’ve had a number of managers that I’ve had to deal with.  I’m not talking about my direct supervisors, but instead, I’m talking about those who run the store.  At my first job I didn’t really have much direct contact with them and that’s the way I liked it.  They were just these generic (usually male) figures in suits that could’ve been replaced with anyone else and I really wouldn’t have noticed.  That’s not to say some of them weren’t nice but I was a teenager and they were typically older with little in common with myself.  They – probably – only saw me as one in a long line of faceless workers that might not be at that job longer than a year.      As I worked at that same job longer and I grew out of my teenager’s shell, I made more and more friends with most of the workers there.  The supervisors that came and went were usually easy to get along with but I also came into more contact with the store managers since I had been there so long.
     Relationships with managers in retail always swing from one extreme to the other.  They either are complete tightwads who think about nothing other than the job or they are really laidback and relatable.  You get the ones who are only focused on moving up in the business or those who are just cashing in the nice paychecks until something better comes along.

     In the grocery world, I’ve had more of the former than the latter, but that only really affected me when I was a cashier and nearly constantly surrounded by them as they went into and out of their office.  When I was off in other departments, however, I could find ways to avoid them bothering me.  Then again, you would get one or two managers who couldn’t leave you alone because they always had something extra for you to do (you know, besides the 4-5 other things you were trying to get accomplished).  I typically didn’t have many personal conversations with my managers and I preferred that.  I don’t care if a manager tries to be my best friend as long as they let me do my job.  In my years in the grocery retail world, I think I knew 1-2 facts in total about the several store managers I’ve had.

     In the electronics world, I’ve had more direct contact with the managers since the staff and the store are both smaller.  You not only have your supervisor to watch over you but you have several other supervisors who patrol the stores and then there are 3-4 managers who are in charge of everything.  I’ve had one of the best store managers in electronics retail but also the worst store manager.

     The best – let’s just call him Alex – was laidback but also knew how to talk to people as if they were people instead of five-year-olds.  Alex talked to you and seemed to enjoy talking to you.  It wasn’t one of those things where it was forced or awkward.  He could joke around with people but could also put customers in their place when they were being overly obnoxious.  One time, with another manager and a coworker of mine, we had a mini snowball fight toward the end of the night.  How often does one have a snowball fight with their management?  Alex seemed like a pretty straightforward type of guy who, at the very least, presented the image of a person you could talk to about things and felt like he was taking your concerns to heart.

     Sadly, like all the good management people, they don’t last.  They get transferred or a promotion or a better offer from a competitor.  What’s worse is that anyone after that person will pale in comparison.  What’s even worse than that is when that next person isn’t just a letdown but is also truly the worst manager you’ve ever had.  When you go from a nice environment as that to an environment where you dread coming into work each and everyday, things seem truly depressing.

     The worst manager – let’s just call her Karen – was the opposite of Alex.  It was either her way or the highway on a lot of issues.  If she didn’t like you, she really didn’t like you.  When it came to rallying the troops to have “fun”, every word she said felt so forced, as if she was a robot created in a lab with no contact with humans.  Her tone was almost always set to “condescension”.  She treated longtime employees like they were suspected criminals.  Our store lost quite a few good people under her reign than under any of the other managers at that job.

     I hate to say this but I’ve noticed a lot of women managers who seem to take their authority to their heads and act like dictators.  And I feel this is a comment more on the American work environment than anything else.  It’s as if they feel like they have to be harder, stricter, and ruder than their male counterparts just so they can prove themselves capable managers.  Which is ridiculous because I’ve had a number of male managers who were complete buffoons.  And the higher up you found men in management roles, the more idiotic they seemed to me.  If the pay scale was better in women’s favor and more roles of management were opened up to them – not to mention a whole host of different social/economic changes that could take place – I think they wouldn’t feel the need to go mad with power.

     But as it was, whenever Karen tried to have a friendly chat with me about my family or my schooling, I felt like she was mentally ticking off the seconds that the conversation lasted so she would know when she could end it.  This is the mental conversation I pictured Karen having as she talked with me:

     “Okay… now smile as he talks… thirty seconds… nod… forty seconds… say something as a follow-up… okay, now raise your eyebrows in surprise… good, good… almost there… say ‘that sounds nice’… perrrrfect… laugh and then thank him for all his hard work today… and now walk away.  Great!  That’s one conversation down for the day.”

     The only thing I hate more than the fake attempts at being friendly is the fact a lot of managers talk down to their employees like they were all children.  This fact is especially amusing since most of the managers I’ve had in retail were either around my age or younger than I am.  I understand that most electronics stores hire younger people but that doesn’t mean they’re babies.  So stop treating them as such!  Most of my coworkers, while young, are still smart enough to do their jobs, and if you’re hiring them, why don’t you trust them to know what to do?  When you talk down to someone who either doesn’t deserve it or is older than you, you come across as a total douchebag.  Then nobody likes you and everyone looks forward to you being fired or transferred.

     Another awkward development of the Internet age is friend requests on Facebook.  Now, I’m not talking about every person you’ve ever worked with requesting to be your friend despite only saying 3 words to you in over a year of working together.  No, I’m talking about managers who request to be your friend.  I get the fact that some just want to spy on their workers to see what they say about their jobs (and if that’s the case, do they really think we don’t know what they’re trying to do?) but others just either want to keep an eye on people’s behaviors outside of work or truly want to be their friend.  Either way, there’s danger ahead.  I’ve friended a few managers on Facebook but I try to keep that number low – only those who I think are genuine in their request – or I wait for them to have left the store before doing so.

     But what do you do when they request your friendship?  Do you accept it and patrol what you say?  Do you ignore it and then constantly wonder if that manager is going to bring up the fact you haven’t added them on Facebook yet?  Don’t you just hate that?  I don’t do a very good job of patrolling my own thoughts but I’ve learned to deal with the fact that if managers want to judge me on what I say on some stupid social site then that’s their prerogative and I can always find another job doing something else.

     If managers are going to go the route of acting like our friends then don’t act like our warden the next minute.  That will just breed resentment and hostility in your workers.  Nobody likes a two-faced manager.

     I just wish that if all of these managers are forced to attend the same brainwashing training seminar, the seminar instructors teach them how to fake being relatable better.  Because most of them are doing a horrendous job of it.  Again, I don’t think managers have to be our best friends but if they’re going to try and be friendly then look up what the word “friendly” means in the dictionary.  Otherwise, just go about doing your business and I’ll do mine.  Hey, I’m just here to try and help you managers become better people, is all.  You’re welcome.

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...