8 February, 2008

There lays a sign near the ceiling, raised high above the operations section of the store. Lay two of us from head to foot and you've got the width of this sign. It's a pretty simple sign: The words "check" and "out", marrily combined with the ambiguous hyphen, lays on this ten-foot-ish monstrosity.

But it seems that a lot of customers don't understand its meaning. Though the cashiers lay right behind this hanging sign, a sizeable minority just don't seem to look up.

Take this for example: a lady customer observed the usual busyness of our customer service desk. Products switching hands back and forth, with a flurry of typing in the machines along the way.

The customer then approached this long lineup; a lineup that leads to a sign that says "Returns and Exchanges" ironically. Thankfully she was relocated a mere eight feet away to checkout after she reached the Returns associate.

A couple of days later, a lineup formed. Customers were mostly patient and commendation should be forwarded at that, however, a customer then made a sort of a loop through security and made himself the front of the line.

Customers behind him murmured. "What a travesty," the customer after this gentleman in queue then murmured to me, in a superbly dissatisfied voice, "this is unfair"!

I'm sure it could be. But it seems that I couldn't say much about that. How can one judge a case when the evidence was obscured? I can't help it but to take care of customers instead of patrolling the queue like you probably have wished.

A friend and fellow retail employee once said to me: "The customer surely isn't always right. They're always around 99.5% wrong and they seem to be ignorant about that."

This observation probably was part of the half a percentage point where the customer was right. The sign above the check-out section does seem to be obstructed when viewed from afar. It could be a very good looking piece of art if you didn't have glasses on.

Here's an idea. Let's make the sign bigger. Ten feet away and big but it's still not enough if the occasional patron doesn't see it. Let's tear a hole through the roof and stick a twenty-foot monstrosity, with a glass case above it.

Surely, they'll see it now.

Retail Life is a column for those wanting a different view within a "customer centric" retail environment. The identity of this column's writer has been obscured to maintain a healthy relationship with his employer.