> I'm sorry but if you cost the store $25 by leaving a damned ROAST in the cereal aisle, I would be perfectly happy to never let you in the store again.
Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase", and possibly eat the cost in the form of some incentive to come back to try to keep them. The ones that don't complain either didn't notice, or they don't care enough to stop shopping, or they won't come back like you suggest.
The ones that complain get it taken care of, the ones that don't don't cost you anything. Win-win-break even?
Aside from putting up the odd sign to discourage certain behavior, no, I do not think that stores have any good reason to bend over backwards to keep individual customers.
Retail is far too accommodating already. Some people figure that being a “valued customer” means they can be an unending source of sunken costs in time, effort and stress, among other things. And those costs can be multiplied across the other customers waiting in line, too.
If a “customer” is destroying your inventory, annoying other customers, or commanding far more of your time than warranted, there is no reason to put up with them. Protect the larger investment, which is: all your other customers, your store, and your employees.
Stores bake that into the cost of doing business, it's like dropping something and breaking it, in the vast vast majority of cases you won't be charged for it, just be clean up on aisle 3...
Heck I've dropped jars or similar things during bagging after paying for them several times and every time I was offered a replacement.
Mistakes happen, it's often considerably more expensive to deal with customer complaints especially in the age of social media than it is to replace an item.
It's also important to note that this is baked into the cost of doing business all along the supply chain, if items are not sold they will be often returned by the store to the distributor which would chuck them as a loss, or more often than not sell them for other uses other than human consumption.
Some perishables are thrown away others are then sold to other industries e.g. the roast that was left over might end up as dog food...
For a dog food company it's cheaper to buy discarded meat produce the dog food take samples and while it's being shipped do the cultures to ensure that there are no contaminants or bacteria and if something fishy is found just do a recall upstream for specific batch than it is to buy "fresh" meat and ingredients which are fit for human consumption.
Supply chains are huge and complex and all these little annoyances don't really count for much, it only really bothered very small stores that have to buy everything almost up front and they aren't leasing effectively shelf space for distributors.
> > Some people figure that being a “valued customer” means they can be an unending source of sunken costs in time, effort and stress, among other things.
> Stores bake that into the cost of doing business
> "I return half of what I buy," says 30-year-old Alex Demetri, who spends £500 to £700 on clothes each month.
> She also admits to wearing some of her clothes first before returning them.
> It is customers like Ms Demetri who are causing problems for shops, which are "struggling to cope" with the number of items returned, new research suggests.
> So-called "serial returners" are bringing back items which have been used, are marked or have parts missing, making a quarter of it unfit to resell.
Occasional mistakes happen, but some people deliberately do this kind of stuff.
In Australia if you break something in store, they typically wont charge you, but if they do, they have to charge at cost. I wonder if this another reason many stores dont charge. As any store with a larger markup would have to let you know that $55 vase they were trying to sell you cost them $6.
I think the rule is that, when a business charges a consumer a penalty fee of any kind, the fee must relate to actual costs that the customer's actions imposed on the business. A business could estimate the cost of bananas, but they couldn't use the sale price if that was usually ten times the cost. This applies to things like bank overdraft fees and hotel cleaning charges as well. The idea is that consumer contracts can recover costs, but aren't allowed to punish people.
"sir, you ate 4 grapes in store. Our grapes average 2seeds/grape, so we've calculated lost sales in the range of $800.
You see, those seeds could each grow into a vine that will produce an estimated $100 worth of grapes over the lifetime of the plant. You're basically stealing that money from us!"
I may be wrong... I read this previously that was very clear about the customer was due to pay the supplier cost. But I did a google now to find the article and the best I could find is this is a civil case and not "not covered by the Australian Consumer Law" and it seems to be at discretion of the court for value lost and how at fault you were.
The attrition is going to be high anyhow, tons of stuff gets damaged during shipping, handling and stocking, tons more is never sold.
Most large stores take out nearly everything off the shelves at night even if it's still within it's "use before" date which on it's own is utterly nonsensical to begin with as most items don't expire for days, if not weeks, months and even years from the "use/best before" date.
People drop stuff, people mishandle goods, how many people squeeze a vegetable or a fruit to check if it's ripe damaging it? how many apples get a mushy spot because they banged around in the crate?
You are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel of inventory attrition when you are talking about perishable misplaced items, compared to everything else they are a rounding error.
There is a lot of loss baked into every supply chain, unless you are going to change it in it's entirety really don't bother with the end, the loss at the point of sale is minimal compared to everything else.
> I do not think that stores have any good reason to bend over backwards to keep individual customers.
Funny; want to know how Amazon CS became so popular with people? They gave complainers what they wanted, and only shut down repeat abusers. You want to exchange or return this TV for no reason at all? Go ahead. You bought this a year ago and want to return it now? Get a rep on the phone and it's done.
It was fascinating to watch from the inside. CS reps became easier to hire (no need for independent thought when 95% of the calls can be answered with binary flags determined by a "follow the prompts" wizard), Amazon's CS approval rating skyrocketed, and they're still making money to this day.
So, yeah, they have proven that there is a really good reason to keep all but the most abusive individual customers.
Perhaps my example was a bit too extreme. But someone else replied to me with a better example of notifications on an app, or warnings that items are still in their cart but did not pass the store threshold, etc.
Seems like the maximized value could be somewhere in the middle, maybe without trying to sneak in replacement costs for items left on other shelves..
I agree with your point, but at the same time, you should be charged the price of the food if you grab perishable food and place it in an area that renders it unsafe. I worked in retail and at theme parks, and I'm personally of the opinion that it's better for everyone in the long run if you fire entitled customers.
That would be fine in the ages before social media. Now everyone "takes to twitter" and tries to organize a social pitchfork campaign. The victimhood mentality is real. People get off on the celebrity from being wronged by a big bad corporation. It wouldn't be long before some jerk posts a video of himself leaving a roast on the cereal aisle and being '86'ed from the store, then post it straight to Youtube for all the delicious karma points. Corporate image is a big deal.
Unless you make it "your thing." Take for example the Alamo Drafthouse, a chain of movies theaters that are aggressive in removing patrons that disrupt other viewers' experience. In the few times that people have tried to complain, the company has generally come out of it for the better.
I will admit this strategy won't work for everyone. Most corporations are not willing to respond to a complaint by using social media to (accurately) call the complainer an obnoxious asshole.
The real problem, though, is that one time when the company is in the wrong over a bug in the AI. Then you basically have a faulty AI, and by extension, the store, falsely accusing the customer of vandalism or some such thing. Not a good way to go.
Maybe this is different, but my experience with recent tech innovations in brick-and-mortar payment systems haven't been positive overall. More trouble than they're worth.
This could very well be different, but the minute the store starts valuing the AI over the customer, I think the store is in for some trouble public relations-wise.
Agreed. On a related note, I wonder with the extra efficiency gained from no checkout lines, how much it would offset lost revenue. In other words, if, say, you are able to serve 20% more customers, even if there's 4% more loss from tech bugs (not considering shoplifting), the fact that you're moving more people through the store might make up for it.
If someone buys 45 items, but 3 dont ring up, as long as the 3 were relatively cheap items like a can of beans, as opposed to a $15 jar of spices, does it really matter ? Over time, the system will learn which items "go missing" most often and focus on them specifically for better inventory mgmt.
who's got more profit: Alamo Drafthouse or Regal Cinemas ? Or rather, if you own X-thousand shares of XYZ corp, do you want them to "aggressively wage morality war" at the cost of $1.00/share, or maximize profits ?
From what I've read Alamo Drafthouse has over double the per-screen revenue of Cinemark. Their strict, pro-viewer policies really engender customer loyalty.
Sounds like that place would have lower prices since the costs of customers like that isn't spread around to considerate people, I think I would like to shop there.
Not really. Customers already pay more if they don't have the company card, aren't "loyal" etc... Instead of it being framed as a fine or punishment or way to "fire customers" it is simply referred to as a discount and a way to get coupons.
According to the cupcake example in the video, this is all in real-time, right? A much better experience would be warning the user as they go - the ham remains in their "cart" and is clearly flagged as abandoned (maybe with a push notification if they don't have the phone out, though I imagine most customers will be double-checking).
> Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase", and possibly eat the cost in the form of some incentive to come back to try to keep them. The ones that don't complain either didn't notice, or they don't care enough to stop shopping, or they won't come back like you suggest.
One could simply retrain the customer by literally charging them the moment they take it off the shelf, refunding them if they put it back. It would look crazy on your bank/credit bill but i think a legion of micropayments maybe the future anyways. There might be an opportunity there to turn a stream of 100s of micropayments into meaningful data for the end user.
There are many potential reasons that an item could be put back in the improper spot on a shelf that does not induce a loss for the store nor is malicious by the shopper. Things very often get put back into the same shelf but a different position.
But what about this: What is to stop someone from pulling items out of other people carts?
There are no carts, just bags. This doesn't appear to be a replacement for traditional grocery stores but rather corner stores or bodegas, so there isn't a need for them.
>Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase",
It might be legal federally, and in red states, but this sounds like a class action lawsuit in a liberal state with strong consumer protection laws just waiting for hungry lawyers.
Wouldn't a better solution be to charge the customer for the roast and if they complain, you explain: "sorry, you didn't put it on the proper shelf, the technology considers that as a purchase", and possibly eat the cost in the form of some incentive to come back to try to keep them. The ones that don't complain either didn't notice, or they don't care enough to stop shopping, or they won't come back like you suggest.
The ones that complain get it taken care of, the ones that don't don't cost you anything. Win-win-break even?