Skip to main content

When talking can be a bad habit.

"Is it unreasonable to expect the shopkeeper to get off his phone and acknowledge me rather than just stick his hand out for the money?" tweeted the friend of a friend.

My friend passed the message on to me, observing: "I saw this tweet today by one of my friends and I thought you might be interested in it. Independents pride themselves on their service, but the experience my friend had below is a common one (certainly in my experience) and not something that happens in the multiples..."

There is a mix of good news and bad. The good news is that my friends clearly have high expectations of independent retailers.

The bad news is that for shopkeepers who live in their shops, balancing work and phone calls is tricky. Do you have a policy of never serving while on the telephone? Do you stick to it?

The place to start is to stand on the other side of the counter and ask yourself as a shopper, what value is being added by the shopkeeper? If there is ample choice of alternative places to go to buy what you want, then greater attention to good service is necessary. If there is no choice, then good service is less important.

Remember, you do not have to please every shopper and you can choose which shoppers to please. But even so, it is hard to justify speaking on the phone while serving.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Think before you delist your slowest seller

Retailers need to introduce new products to provide their shoppers with "good news" and to generate interest. But for each new product that you introduce you need to consider delisting an existing line. Easy, you might think. I will just print out the list of products in the category and take off the one with the lowest sales. However, if you do this research from the US suggest you might be wrong. What you need to consider is what sort of demand you have for each product, a white paper by Demand Tec, a US specialist software provider shows. It says that there are two kinds of sales: incremental sales, when products add to the total shopper spend and are not readily substituted by another item transferable sales, where shoppers find an alternative easily when it is not available. Using its software, it shows a category with 50 products from top seller to bottom seller. At the same time it also measures the incremental sales each product provides. The number 50 in ove...

Busy street, empty shop, missed profits

True in part to my New Year resolution, I held a business meeting in an independent coffee shop today just next door to a Starbucks. The cafe was presented well and four staff were busy preparing for the lunchtime rush, at 11am. As my guests were late, I had a half hour overview of footfall on the street outside and in the restaurant. Six customers. Barely enough to form the queue in Starbucks or Pret-a-Manger just down the road. Plus one Italian girl who dropped off her CV. Some people stopped to look at the posters in the window and moved on. The owners seemed quite happy. When I left just after 1215, they were doing brisk trade. However, I have the impression that the business is not working hard enough. It could easily have managed 120 customers between 11 and 12, instead of 12. This is lost profit as the fixed overheads and staff costs are already in place. The owners are clearly busy - perhaps too busy to take time to look at the potential that their cafe has. What shou...

Sticks and stones do hurt

My 17 year-old son returned from a rock festival this week wearing a wristband proudly declaring him 0ver 18. He explained how easy it had been to use someone else's ID to get the identification and said it was ironic that he had not needed to show the over 18 band when buying alcohol. Today, Scottish retailer Abdul Qadar is complaining that public authorities are asking people to lie about their age when making test purchases. What trading standards officers may be forgetting is that the fact that retailers invest in a business premises and trade consistently from it make their job much, much easier. The alternative, a world of markets and itinerant traders, will be far harder to police. Mr Qadar's sense of injustice is fair. Those retailers, like Mr Qadar, who value their investment will seek to trade legally and will not sell alcohol to people under the age of 18. Asking children to lie about their age to local traders is a slander on all retailers.