There are few things in this world I hate.
I do hate peas. Sorry, it is a long story. But in general, I’m not a big fan of wasting my energy on negative stuff, and hate requires a lot of work and drains the creative juices out of me.
Besides peas, I do admit to hating shopping in a physical store, especially in the mall. Shopping, in general, isn’t my thing. As a young boy, my mother would have to drag me to the store to buy my school clothes. I hated trying things on and would rather get a root canal. Not sure why, but I never enjoyed the experience.
Retailers have done such a terrible job of adjusting, adapting and refreshing the shopping experience. Shopping in a mall is something I like to avoid at all costs and is particularly painful. An experience this week, illustrates my point.
Throwing in the Towel
I needed to buy some fresh, new towels for our bathroom. Having updated the shower door and regrouted the tiles, I thought that a new set of towels would be a pleasant surprise for my wife.
I looked online but wasn’t sure of the colors and texture, so I wandered into the vast reaches of The Triangle Town Center, a large mall in Raleigh, not far from home.
It was a Thursday at around noon. There was parking for 10,000 cars, and I think I counted 11, including me. When I walked into Macy’s, I think I saw 14 people. I found my way to the towel section and of course, it was all self-service. No one to help, no data or screens to helpfully answer the question – I felt like I was with Marty and Doc Brown in 1954, Back to the Future. That’s probably a bad reference since in 1954, stores had human beings who would wait on you and help you.
When I finally made a selection, I went to the cash registered and waited for ten minutes. Imagine buying something at Amazon and instead of one-click shopping, you had to wait ten minutes to make a purchase.
No one was at the cash register. I couldn’t find someone to take my $100, so I left empty-handed, dumped the towels on the counter and left completely annoyed at the experience.
I begrudgingly wandered over to Belks another department store. Their broken escalator frustrated me as I couldn’t get downstairs through the store. Seriously?
No one was working on the busted escalator – just a set of moving stairs that weren’t working – perhaps an apt metaphor.
Finally, I found a way to get downstairs through the mall and saw the towels. Same experience, no one to help, little to almost no information. When I went to check out, no human being was in sight. Fortunately, a stocking clerk came by and showed me where I could see a live human being who could check me out. It took me 25 minutes to check out. I only stayed because I needed to check this off my list and get back to work.
The Slow, Painful, Death of Retail
I don’t think retail will die. Bad retail will die, but it can be fixed.
I do believe that if stores aren’t bringing humanity into the picture, they will continue to fail.
Here is one idea – maybe not practical or possible, but an example of a transformarketing approach.
- Imagine having large screens where you could talk with customer service personnel.
- You could do the equivalent of FaceTime or Skype with a human and talk to them for help.
- They have access to data about what the store stocks and where it is.
- They can text the closest sales person or a manager using geo-targeting and other technology.
- They can easily humanize the store and help with the frustration most people experience when the stores are absent of staff.
- They can show empathy.
- They can give look up information for you about the differences in quality or country of origin or other information you need.
Blend the physical with the digital – I recently called this phigital.
Experiment, test, improve the experience at retail. My recent visit felt like a trip in 1960 trying on clothes at Reinettes with my mother making me try on another shirt.
Hey Macy’s and Belk’s, it is 2018. Why not find a way to make it easier for customers to interact with human beings, even if they are sitting in an office far away. If you can’t afford to put more people in the store, find a way to bring more human engagement into the retail shopping experience. If you don’t change and leverage technology, these stores will only plunge into the abyss.
I predict that without some radical shift for traditional retailers, Mr. Bezos will keep stealing your lunch money.
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Photo by Saad Sharif on Unsplash
