Definitely Make It Harder
As a borderline sociopath, I appreciated our local Hy-Vee grocery store’s pandemic-era self checkouts. Not only did they enable me to avoid smalltalk with a stranger, but I always got out faster and with my groceries bagged by category to make it more efficient to put them away at home. So you can imagine my disappointment when I went to check out from Hy-Vee not long ago only to discover that they had removed all of the self-checkout stations.
“What happened to self-checkout?” I asked the very polite teenage boy who was trying to figure out how to cancel the green peppers he had charged me for after I told him they were more expensive poblanos.
“Our manager said it’s because it’s a better customer experience to be face-to-face,” which seems to be the line Hy-Vee representatives have been feeding the media as well.
“That couldn’t have been cheap,” I said.
“I don’t think it was,” he replied. “But I’m pretty sure people were stealing a lot of things too.”
No doubt. Particularly after Hy-Vee turned off the sensor in the bagging zone that double-checked that everything a customer had bagged was also something they had scanned. When I asked at the time why they had done that, I was told it was because some customers had found it inconvenient.
No doubt some customers did.
Anyway, shrinkage – the industry term for when inventory disappears – is a real thing for grocery stores and when even the best of them are operating at thin 3% to 5% operating margins, any spike in theft can be – and probably was – catastrophic to the bottom line.
I talked last week about some examples where maybe it made sense for a business to make things a little harder on its customers. Here, I suspect that some spreadsheet jockey in Hy-Vee’s back office in Des Moines ran the numbers and – even though Hy-Vee is hiding behind the explanation of better customer service – concluded that the company definitely needed to make it harder for people to check out lest the business go under.
As a borderline sociopath, that’s disappointing. But as a spreadsheets guy, I get it.
– Tim
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