I used to work at a grocery store in high school. I worked there from Sophomore year until I came to college. There was a hierarchy in the my department of the store. There were baggers, checkers, and managers. In my mind it was a pretty flawed system because when we were short on checkers, lines got very long because baggers could not help by using the registers and managers were either busy doing other things or just felt like that wasn't part of their job. I was a bagger so I was not very involved in the business side of the operation, however I did occasionally talk to the managers about it.
My senior year our company was bought out so we merged with others and in an effort to make all stores the same, we changed things around a bit. Before these changes, our customer service was great. All of the employees were relatively happy with their position and customers felt comfortable shopping with us. One change we made was that instead of asking customers if they wanted help out to the car, we were supposed to say "I am going to help you out to your car" and insist to go even if they say they don't need it. It was very clear that people felt very uncomfortable with this. My mother even stopped shopping there because it was just poor execution of customer service at that point. They even forced us baggers to wear aprons at all times, which made zero sense considering we were grabbing prepackaged foods and putting them in a bag.
I feel that those changes presented unnecessary transaction costs. Like I said, the workers basically forcing themselves to go out to your car with you drove people away, losing customers and therefor forfeiting sales. They also lost some quality employees. A friend of mine worked there with me and disagreed with all the changes so much that he accepted another job and left the grocery store. I was given the offer to return for summers but opted to turn it down for another part time job. Just recently I learned that the store manager, who ran the entire store (under the direction of corporate), retired early because he was so fed up with everything he was being forced to do. This was my first real job and it gave me a very negative opinion on large organizations.
Grocery stores, in general, face an issue that demand tends to be time varying - it is lower when people are at school and at work and is probably highest right after that - and how staffing should occur to match that demand. Since I'm retired, I sometimes shop during off hours and I see staff who are not busy. Some of that is necessary but obviously too much of it is a drag on profit.
ReplyDeleteYour first paragraph sounds like the opposite of what I described. You seem to be talking about the peak hours. In your response to this comment, you might respond about whether full time staff worked both on peak and off peak and if there really was a way to do that part better overall.
The rest of what you wrote about corporate having a seeming nonsense approach to the business is certainly possible. Companies try different things. Some fail. They then either learn from failure and change their approach or they go out of business. But usually there is some rationale for the alternative way of doing things (even if that rationale ultimately proves flawed). So you might consider what that rationale was and if it had some validity, even if the execution was poor.
I have never really though about how full time staff may experience different levels of crowding. Since we were open 6am-2am there were probably 3 managers working a day. One from 6am-2pm, one from 2pm-10pm, and one from 6pm-2am (overlap due to high after work traffic). As far as I know all managers got paid the same, so it seems unfair that somebody got to work the slow morning hours every week (managers had permanent schedules) and others had to work during the rush day in and day out.
ReplyDeleteI believe that corporate's approach was interesting but since they had so many locations, maybe they weren't paying close enough attention to the store I was at to see that it was not an efficient ideology. However I do find that hard to believe because it really should have been their main focus. Maybe they were waiting to see what the outcome was after people got used to it. I have visited the store but I used self checkout so I could not tell if the changes are still being enforced.