Retail Sucks... Part 1

One of the first things you learn in kindergarten is, "Always put things back where you found them." In Boy Scouts we learn, "Always leave a camp site better than you found it." I have always thought these were great values to live by. Now while a lot of people have not been Boy Scouts... statistically less than half of the American public have ever been in the Boy Scouts, I am sure that most people have been in kindergarten.

Now here is my question... Why DON'T people put things back where they found them? Anyone one who has worked in retail knows what I am talking about. I have worked in three stores at the Palisades Center Mall. In chronological order they are; Joanns, CompUSA, and JCPenney. I have come to believe that people shop in the mind set that the store that they are in allows them too.

Joanns is by far the most lax store when it comes to enforcing rules of courteous conduct in their store. The other day this lady knocked over this vase and it broke. I was loud. Everyone heard it. So did she... She even looked at the broken shards on the floor. But she looked at them as she was waking away. So I had to walk over and clean it up. I have no problems with people breaking stuff at the store. Believe me; sometimes I break things just to get some anger out, but I always clean up after myself. What makes you think you can do these things?

America has created a new caste system that is defined by retail hierarchy. Depending on which side of the counter you are on depends on how well you get treated. As a culture, we should not have a mind set of treating people depending on the quantity of business that they can bring. It seems that if you just threaten to take your business elsewhere the store will appeal to your every whim no matter how trivial.

Why is it that when a company grows to include share holders then they no longer have a backbone. Of if you complain they just send you a bunch of coupons when you make a complaint. It is not always about pleasing your customer. A company as a whole should stand up against being used. Sometimes doing the right thing, is not doing the right thing. If someone is manhandling the product the company should have the right to tell them to be careful. At what point in history was, "You break it you buy it" replaced with "The customer is always right."

In the long run, doing what ever the customer wants is not really a good thing. There are people who buy things from Costco, use them for a year and then go back and return them. Costco will accept them and give them back whatever they paid for them. These people do not just return little things. These people return Digital Cameras, Laptops, and TVs a year or more after they bought them. Electronics are worthless to a store a year after they are sold because no one else wants to buy them. Using these three items lets just say that the average return ticket price is $1,300.00. Let us say that 5 people a day do this at every single Costco store. Anyone who has every worked the customer service desk at a retail store knows that this is a reasonable number. I called the Nanuet Costco warehouse and the person who picked up the phone told me that there were somewhere in the vicinity of 400 to 450 warehouses worldwide. He also stated that Costco opened up four to six new stores a year. If there are 450 Costco stores in the world, the company as a whole must take a loss of 1.06 billion dollars a year.

The average stock holder will not tolerate this kind of loss to the revenue of the store. So what will happen to reverse this kind of loss? The company has three options. The stores can either, raise prices, buy cheaper products (made possible by outsourcing jobs) or laying of workers. Raising prices rarely happens in the retail world. So if a company does any mixture of the last two it means the loss of American jobs. Bottom line is that America, due to its customer arrogance is shopping itself out of a job.