The Piggly Wiggly way | Hacker News Reader

The Piggly Wiggly way

economist.com

27 pointsprostoalex6 comments

> "If firms abandon trying to differentiate themselves with good service, they are making themselves vulnerable to the sort of attack Britain’s mainstream supermarkets are now suffering from an invasion of German discounters."

Hasn't internet shopping shown that "good service" often does mean self service instead of obsequious staff? Businesses should be eager to get rid of their large staff of customer service drones and replace them with automated systems and a handful of well-paid human exception handlers.

Me> "I'm looking for a sound bar with a wireless subwoofer."

Big box store employee> "Such a thing doesn't exist. It would defy the laws of physics. The signal couldn't travel across the room to the woofer in time to produce a clean sound."

Me> "Odd, I could swear I've seen such a thing before."

Employee> "Nope, it's impossible."

Me> "Then what's this right here?" (Points to a sound bar with wireless subwoofer on display.)

Employee> "Oh! Well this isn't my department, and the guy who knows about sound bars is out to lunch. I didn't think it was possible because I'm a Java programmer, you see, and I couldn't think of a way to program it so the signal would reach the woofer in time."

Me> "A Java programmer? You don't say."

---

I don't want to spend two hours researching every little consumer electronics product I might buy, and I'm willing to pay a slight premium to someone who is able to spend five minutes educating me. I suspect there are many others who are similar.

> "I don't want to spend two hours researching every little consumer electronics product I might buy, and I'm willing to pay a slight premium to someone who is able to spend five minutes educating me. I suspect there are many others who are similar."

That's basically REI's business model. Their staff has extensive personal experience with what they sell, and the stores run classes on what equipment to get and how to use it. They've got a lot more customer-facing staff than something like the supermarkets mentioned in the article need, because REI customers need more educating than people buying groceries. It's a real pity that Best Buy and friends are run more like a hybrid of the grocery stores and a used car lot.

Something I learned during my first job (big box co. tech support and computer sales): self service is great for people who know what they want or know more about what they're buying than the salesperson does. Groceries is a great example of this: I generally know what I like to eat a lot more than most grocery clerks could possibly know, and I get groceries pretty often.

It's less ideal when you don't know much about the product (just that you need one) and don't have the time to go spend a few weeks researching the purchase. I spent some time selling computers: for most customers, they knew what they wanted to do with the computer already (skype a military spouse, work on MS Office Documents, play Skyrim, whatever), but if I was helping them chances were they didn't know how to quantify that in terms of CPU/RAM/HDD/Graphics card/etc., and being able to actually narrow their selection down to a few computers that could meet their needs and explain the differences between them seemed to really put people at ease in what would otherwise been a confusing process.

To expound on my point: I don't know anything about... say... HVAC systems. A self service system for purchasing an HVAC would probably be unnecessarily stressful and confusing for me (at least, it would force me to go become knowledgeable about HVAC systems), and I might even make a mistake and get one that can't actually handle heating and cooling my house. This is an obvious place where a knowledgeable salesperson could save me a lot of time and frustration.

It's fine for retailers to provide actual experts to help customers where help is needed. Supermarkets aren't one of those places. They just need one or two people to answer questions of the form "which aisle has X?" and the rest of the business would be better run by robots. It's weird for the Economist to be indulging in their delusions otherwise.

For things like consumer electronics and appliances, it's my experience that most stores cannot provide employees who make better recommendations than can be had by just checking the most recent Consumer Reports review, so even though there is a need for a human staff you can't exactly say that the staff they've got is a justified expense. If the sales staff never had conflicts of interest when it comes to helping consumers it would probably be a very different story.

On the other side of the coin, I once overheard a sales clerk at (now defunct big box computer retailer) trying to push one monitor over another because the first one had a larger dot pitch. Bigger is always better, right?

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