Okay, I’m sure you’ve noticed that buying something at a retail store is now 10 times harder than it has to be, especially if you need any kind of assistance. And conversely, working in retail or the service industry in general is a stressful and thankless task, even more so than it ever was. Here’s my take on why that is.
In my time, I’ve worn many hats. I have done time in retail, I’ve worked both front of house and on the line in a restaraunt, I’ve been a professional sound engineer, I’ve been a backend and frontend developer, I’ve orchestrated and written processes for complete businesses including retail chains. I’ve done a lot, and it’s given me something of a unique perspective on how things fit together; or in many cases how they don’t. I’m not claiming to be an expert, and this is all pretty much obvious and common sense, but these days it seems that common sense is getting a lot less common.
So let’s break down what’s going on across the board, and see where the fundamental disconnect has happened.
Now, I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass and say everything was sweetness and light. Retail was, is, and always will be a hard job. Being on your feet for 8 hours a day, dealing with thousands of customers, moving tonnes of stock, and working some of the most inhospitable hours, makes for one of the worst and most difficult careers you can take on. There is a prevailing attitude that Retail is easy, because the barrier to entry or skill level required to start is low, but the physical demands and social energy necessary to cope with 40 hours of Retail work are immense.
But back in the day, you had support. Store managers had responsibility and authority, they could decide their store layouts, they would back up their staff in cases where a customer is clearly being unreasonable or just plain wrong, and they could hire and fire as necessary to ensure adequate coverage, so staffing levels were high.
Let’s take the example of a pet store. You would have an on-duty manager overseeing the running of the store, ordering stock to ensure sufficient supply and setting discounts to get stale product out of the store, a staff member on checkout, one dedicated to taking care of the animals with food and clean bedding and sees to catching and packaging them for customers who wish to purchase one, one in the back taking in deliveries and seeing to stock replenishment to the floor, and two floating staff on the floor to see to customer needs, reorganize shelves and/or jump onto a second checkout if the lines back up. During off-peak hours, those floating staff may drop to 1 or even none, with the manager taking the floor role. That’s between 4 and 6 staff, depending on load, to keep the store running.
These days, that same pet store would have 3 staff during the day, 2 off-peak. 1 “cashier”, who changed some the animals food and bedding in the 20 minutes before the store opened, replenishes stock near their checkout, and answers the phone for customer inquiries. A “Floating” staff member, who catches and packages the animals for sale, picks and packages online orders for pickup, replenishes stock throughout the rest of the store, and sees to customer needs. And the manager, who has to do literally everything else. And off-peak, that floating staff member goes away too.
Oh, and to add a new hurdle to the picture, you can also add DoorDash/Instacart/etc. runners (who don’t care at all about what it is they’ve been told to get) demanding staff help to find a product before they’ve even walked through the entrance, taking away even more staff resources.
Store management has no ordering capability whatsoever, they have to sell whatever is sent algorithmically by head office, with no ability to adjust pricing. Indeed in many cases even incidental things like heating in the winter and cooling in the summer is controlled from head office, for “cost saving” reasons or something.
“Customer Satisfaction” is hard to quantify. There is no measurable gain from ensuring your customers are happy, and things like “customer experience surveys” encourage treating the symptoms (like giving a complimentary gift card to the one complaining customer) that complete ignore the endemic problem that caused ten more customers to walk away and not come back silently. Not only that, blanket policies giving complaining customers gift cards to “keep them happy” and ensure they return, no matter the merits of their complaint, only encourages those customers to get more outlandish and entitled in their demands, especially at the store itself, reinforcing “Karen” behaviours and making working there so much harder - if a staff member says no, their manager won’t have their back and overrides them, and if their manager (by some miracle) does back them up, the “Karen” in question will just complain to head office, which gets them a refund and earns the store a demerit.
So frazzled staff, who are doing the work of 2 or 3 people, have to cope with the demands of entitled individuals who have been trained by this reinforcement to believe treating staff like crap gets them their way. And thanks to wages remaining stagnant over the past few decades while inflation and prices soar, along with the prevailing attitude remaining that Retail is easy and only for unskilled/worthless people, the workforce learns they are not cared about or appreciated at all, which depresses the workforce further, making them not care in response.
Meanwhile, Head Office is under increasing pressure to increase profits at all costs, and while messing with pricing has direct and measurable knock-on effects (at least when they can’t blame it on inflation), reducing staff hours has no measurable negative effect on their bottom line. So staff get squeezed, hours get stripped, you can’t find a staff member to help you with your shopping, and when you do they just don’t care.
The “Free Market” demands higher and higher profits for shareholders, with no consequences at all for those increased profits. A co-operative or some other kind of “Benevolent Owner” could act as a bulwark, ensuring decent conditions and pay for workers, and better service for customers. But in many cases, those kinds of stores are rapidly outpriced by larger hedge-fund run conglomerates, running with thinner margins and selling in bulk.
While customers appreciate good customer service, they appreciate lower prices more. So at the end of the day, this is all your fault.
I lied.
I know I’ve done a fair amount in my time, but “Economist” was never among the roles I’ve had, probably for good reason.
What I’m saying is: I don’t know.
I would like to think, however, that a Universal Basic Income would help. If you don’t have to work to survive, you will be more inclined to do the work you would like to do, the work you care about. And if an employer is treating you like shit, you would have the fundamental freedom to be able to walk away to somewhere you’re better treated. So suddenly employers are beholden to their employees, rather than the other way around.
Posted 2024-08-23 by Robert "Anaerin" JohnstonOkay, sure. But my online name has been Anaerin for 20-odd years now, it’s reasonably unique, and my last domain (awoo.ga) was eaten up by the country of Gabon reclaiming it’s TLD. So I’m here, with a domain that matches my handle. And as it’s more than a little implied that a domain has to have (at minimum) a website, this is what you get.
[EDIT] It looks like the awoo.ga domain might not be lost after all. But still, given what happened before, this move is probably going to be permanent. - Update, I’ve opted not to renew awoo.ga. So we live here now.
Well, this is a statically generated site built using Hexo. I’m using the hexo-bridge plugin to be a web-based admin for the site, but as hexo-bridge isn’t designed for public use (there’s no security on it at all), the pages are being spit into a folder and a basic nginx container is hosting those (in read-only form).
My setup is detailed (and available for anyone to use) on github, under my “docker-hexo-bridge” repo.
A bunch of stuff. Most of which you won’t have access to unless you know me and I’ve given you access. At which point, you’ll also have the URL.
That’s easy. Replace awoo.ga with anaer.in and you should be good to go.