The Incentives in grocery stores are a bit backward.
Customers are grumpy when items are out of stock, so employees want things to be in stock. But as you purchase an item, it gets steadily closer to being out of stock. So employees are slightly negatively impacted each time you purchase.
Grocery stores are supposed to look nice, so employees straighten the shelved items all day long. But every time you purchase an item, the shelf begins to look a little less nice.
The decorative displays take energy and work to set up, all for the purpose of attracting customers to them; but as those customers are attracted, the displays become steadily less attractive—and the work of the employees becomes less visible and also less effective for the future.
And each time you have a need and ask someone a question, it pulls them from their assigned task to the variable demand of customer service; meanwhile there is no way to document the Ad hoc customer service demands or track fulfillment of them to each employee, so there is little credit given to the employee for the effort, but there might be a negative impact on the employee’s ability to execute their other tasks on time, which could result in some negative perspective by management.
So, as the online ordering team I work on moves throughout the store, if we move slowly on a per-item basis, that might be seen as a negative (in fact management has never commented verbally about being slow but leaves posted notes indicating that some of us need to get faster), but moving quickly contrasts directly with providing good customer service to those who need it.
When the online ordering team has to interrupt meat or deli or seafood to get them to fulfill one of our orders, they feel imposed on by us, not seeing our customers as urgent as their own task list—they have that same conflict of interest that each employee has when interrupted by a customer, except they don’t hide the conflict as we aren’t seen as customers needing to be smiled at.
Watch people in the grocery store and you’ll notice they attempt always to look like they are going somewhere purposefully, and they often turn down aisles rather than cross paths with you. This is partially to minimize risk of their being interrupted by you, without wanting to seem rude.
It’s very interesting to me to see how in the end, all the incentives are toward elimination of customer demand.
I guess this is the reality of working toward a goal that is not aligned with the businesses goal. The businesses goal is to sell more stuff today; our goal is to set things up in the store and make customers happy. But we don’t get anything for accomplishing our goal really, and we don’t get anything for helping the business accomplish its revenue goal.
When you don’t experience direct benefits from a busy day; the incentives are such that you’re slightly at odds with the customers in all your daily requirements, and so the requirement that you readily serve the customer has to be enforced through some subtle threat that to not take care of customers would be A Big Problem.
I guess the ideal state is to do as little work as possible for as much pay.
I think I can see how in larger companies with a large low paid work force, labor and business interest end up almost completely at odds with each other and thus you have collective bargaining on the one hand and anti union efforts on the other.
I wonder if this could be better solved by incentivizing workers in tiny ways that make them feel like they have more control over their day and have something to be gained when the business is doing well on its overall revenue goal. But I’m not sure how that could be done in a grocery store, and it might be that this would just confuse some employees and only motivate ones who think about things in a similar way to how I do.