The Big-ening

Hi and Welcome to the A & J PEI Treasures E Jean Simpson Author Blog Post and Podcast. I’m your host, Jean coming to you from the beautiful Province of Prince Edward Island, Canada!! The blog post and podcast is an opinion piece and only reflects this author’s opinion and not that of any other entity. I hold no designations in politics, economics or medicine. I am retired from the mental health field. I am a humanitarian and speak from that viewpoint only. Whether you agree or not, at least I hope it makes you think. This week I talk about the horror that can come with the ‘big-ening’. I use this to describe the enlargement of companies and the use of a main company to do a lot of the clerical work. I look at some of the issues it causes from the viewpoint of small towns. If you want to find out more, then stay tuned…!

Lately we’ve been waiting for a back ordered product to come in to a local store. We are using it on a new project that Hubby is working on. So, we’ve been watching closely. Imagine our delight when the local store showed that they had been able to get some in. We had groceries to get and other stuff at the same time and it seemed like absolutely perfect timing. I seldom go into town. I tend to stay and do stuff at home while hubby goes out. Then we put the items away when he gets home. He got home with everything on the list except the item. When I asked, he said that the conversation went like this.
‘Hi, I see you have the product listed as being on the shelf online.’
Customer service, ‘sorry, it’s on the truck.’
Hubby, ‘I only come to town every couple of weeks, is there a possibility of getting some before I leave?’

Apparently it was not possible. I can’t blame the store. They didn’t have it in the store. It was sitting somewhere in the truck. It still had to be unloaded. It was however, inconvenient to see it listed on the store website when it was not in fact in the store. I’m making grand and sweeping assumption that the store inventory is not taken care of in store, but rather at what I like to call the ‘mothership’. I use the term ‘mothership’ to refer to the head store/head company of any company entity. It usually does most of the various administrative duties so as not to duplicate services. I find that some of the processes in some of these ‘motherships’ need some looking at. For example, there might be more people looking for items that were on that truck. Not everyone in the area knows that the truck has to be unloaded and the items show up on the shelves at some later unspecified time. I might suggest that the ‘mothership’ save their smaller branches a lot of discomfort and the customers some angst if they took one simple step of not hitting the order processed and shelved button quite so quickly. This one step would make life easier for the branches that have to deal with the customers who feel that they are being put off and inconvenienced. This one step might save the stores a great deal of customer service angst and improve upon the reputation of the stores in general. It seems in smaller areas, that things can be made more difficult by some of the conveniences that are made through the ‘mothership’.

I know that it is the thing now and has been for awhile to buy up little companies and make one big company. My husband and myself both lost jobs to those types of mergers. One particular one was actually quite well done. They gave lots of notice to the staff. They developed a help to find a job program…with supports. The whole department had moved to a different Province. They actually had expressed concern for those ousted. I don’t currently hate the company and had friends who had stayed with the company. Respect makes a huge difference in these cases. Of course no one was happy to lose their job. We weren’t insane. At the same time, I know that it tends to come with a lot of confusion, changes and pretty much feeling like chaos reigns supreme. I know the feeling of it being a sinking ship. I therefore have some sympathy for those who are going through trauma with the new leadership in Twitter. I also know that if they get the wrong person at the helm, there can be changes of leadership happen as well. The company I described, their first attempt at being run through US sources was rather a debacle. They made a huge assumption that Canadians and the USA citizens run similarly in business. It was a choice they later regretted and changed leadership. Never make the mistake of assuming that everyone runs like the country you are from. Terrible choices can result. But, I digress. This is more about how big company running smaller companies can result in some difficulties.

It seems an issue with stores in some areas that often things are left in the warehouse rather than having a few on the floor. It is hard to say whether this is because some pricier things tend to grow feet and walk or if there is a lack of communications within the store itself. For example, if an item is searched for high and low and is not found on the shelf, this might be an item to take note of and it should go to someone who can make note of the missing items and someone either finds and replaces them or reports them as missing and removes them from inventory. The problem is that someone looking for the item is left feeling that no one cares which is not conducive to small town atmosphere. This can cause angst for the customers who perceive that nothing got done about the missing item that they wanted. This leaves one to wonder if the item has been simply misplaced or if it grew legs and walked. If you can’t trust the inventory, then that is a problem.

For those who miss the point of the growing feet and walking, I’m talking about shoplifting which is a huge epidemic. https://comparecamp.com/shoplifting-s... This article suggests that there are ‘over 200 million individual cases annually.’ This is not something that helps the retail market and increases your prices at the checkout. It is also, in the same article, suggests it to be a gateway crime. In other words, it is a slippery slope when one starts to steal from stores. Of course there is also another problem that many hate to think of because it calls staff into question, but it is also a sort of theft which can affect the bottom line and prices overall as well. So, on top of actual losses from various thefts, there are losses to a store from lack of planning or unclear chain of command. There is also the cost of training and retraining if staff has to be replaced often. This can occur with staff frustration. There is the cost of staff frustration when customers are displeased with not finding products that they expect to see.

Then there is the “I have to go back to the warehouse and get the item you requested”. This seems interesting. When there is more than one of a particular item in the online stock (and it is correct), the staff go back and obtain the one item. They generally have to do it using a cart of some sort. I’m not sure if there are stock restrictions or paperwork that needs to go with it, but it seems that the same items have the same issue come up more than once. There must be a chain of command for these items. Are the staffs unfamiliar with the chain of command? Are they so overwhelmed with work that they are not keeping track of what is missing and what needs refilling? It is especially confusing when there is actual space on the shelf for the item.

Sorry readers and listeners, I’m not doing this to nitpick (an old saying which has to do with lice for those who have historic interest, yeah gross LOL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitpick...). At any rate, the definition aside, I’m not doing it. I’m showing you why stores in small towns seem to have difficulties. I’m also showing you how to improve things. You see, the problem that comes from this is that people can’t find what they want. In this day and age of expensive, but easier travel, many have chosen to go to the bigger centres to shop or shop online. The fallout from that is that some people do not want to shop in local stores, those wanting to shop online rather than locally or who want to shop in a bigger centre to avoid frustration are killing small towns. There are a lot of options. If you want to compete with the larger centres and online sales, then customer service is what you have to work on offering. Being content with the status quo is not attracting doctors and other professionals to live in your area. It is one thing to build houses, to try to attract doctors and other professionals to your area, but if you do not provide them service when they go to buy goods and services, if you provide only frustration and not being able to find items, then you are killing your chances of attracting people to work and live in your area. In fact, I would argue that EVERY customer service person, EVERY staff person in your store is a store ambassador. This is not an unknown idea. People in business have always acknowledged that the receptionist is your first experience of a company.

The problem starts and ends with all of us. As shoppers, we need to appreciate customer service. Stores need to manage their customer experience. You need to make staff feel valued. You need to train staff. They need to feel valued for telling you if something isn’t on the shelf. You need to address these smaller issues. As Samuel Smiles is credited with saying, “Where men or nations have broken down, it will almost invariably be found that neglect of little things was the rock on which they split.” So, readers and listeners, if I would have you come away with something from this post, it would be that it is the little things as well as the great and huge things that make a place successful or not. To skimp on one thing will mess up others.

I think one of the jobs that I worked the hardest on was one where my boss literally said to me, don’t worry about the office politics or anything like that. YOU work for the CLIENT. Not exact words but the idea. They paid me, they took my feedback…but my main job was for the clients…not office politics, not how I felt, or how anyone else felt. The client was clearly defined and they were my boss. My immediate supervisor told me what jobs I had to do in general. The chain of command was clear…I answered to him and he would deal with the rest unless otherwise stated. It was the only job that I didn’t absolutely hate doing job evaluations for. Somehow he was able to translate I want to survive another year with some general thoughts into something that was acceptable to the higher ups. So, for your employees who are person centred, you have some ideas. For staff that are number centred, let them manage the inventory issues and other number driven stuff. A good employer can take the strengths of their staff and make the staff an effective body. Some small town issues are not insurmountable if you make the staff a partner in customer service. Make them proud of the jobs they do…they should be. It’s not an easy job. They are the only thing standing between customer chaos and customer satisfaction! Whether you agree with me or not, I hope I made you think. Thanks for listening to my podcast and/or reading my blog post and thanks for your interest in A & J PEI Treasures! Keep watching because we’re always working on something. Thank you!

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