Posts
Mark Twain once said that there are three types of lies: “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Certainly Mr. Twain could have been speaking of Staples even though it didn’t exist way back in his days. He was just way ahead of his time. This blog post is all about statistics or should I say the manipulation that Staples uses statistics or should I say more lies of Staples. But then again are you surprised? If you have been reading this blog, nothing of Staples’ lies would be a surprise.
Let’s now turn the clock all the way back to my college days when between Political Science courses and a Statistics course. Back then I learned a lot about the manipulation of data and how it can alter the truth. So get ready for Professor Brown’s crash course of Statistics.
First off, all statistics begin with a sample size. The larger the sample size, the better the representation of the real world you get. This is true most of the time. It is quite possible to get a sample size too large and thus create many incorrect conclusions drawn from it. Consider all the political polls that have come out lately. Depending on who does the collecting of the data and who is asked, the results could skewed to misrepresent the truth. If say only 5 people were polled about which presidential candidate a person supports, this would not be a fair representation of the whole country as the sample size is way too small. On the other hand if everybody in the world could possibly be polled about which candidate for U.S. President each person liked, the results would become very undesirable as most of the data would be inaccurate. Sadly, this is how Staples collects its improper data.
As I have realized over my 20+ years in retail, there are two types of customers: traditional ones and non-traditional ones. The traditional ones could be called the regular customers, those who visit a retail establishment with some regularity. The non-traditional customer is those who are curiosity seekers and may or may not purchase anything. It is these customers that are usually the hardest to please because they don’t shop in the establishment often enough to care and don’t want to be bothered with anything more than getting out of the store as quickly as possible.
Another consideration to make is that most non-traditional customers shop mostly after 5pm at night as these are family people just out for a night out. The traditional customer usually are those that do the majority of their shopping well before 5pm. Walk around any mall or store and notice the difference of the type of people around and you will quickly realize that it is a completely different type of crowd. It is the non-traditional customer that makes many employees not want to work after 5pm. They just don’t like dealing with these type of people.
So how do you sell services to the non-traditional customer? Simply put, you don’t and realistically you can’t. Yes, you can open the big can of whoopass excuses and say that services can be sold to this group, but I have NEVER seen it be successful. I do mean NEVER! It is stupid to ever think you can as most managers think that is possible to sell to the non-traditional customer and it becomes hilarious when they always fail miserably.
So now how does all this relate to Staples rewards cards? Welcome to the Staples’ manipulation of data.
As mentioned before, the non-traditional customer has no interest in any services and this includes signing up for or using a rewards card. Not only are they not interested, but they feel being harassed by being asked all the time. For those employees who arrive at store opening up to around 4 or 5pm, getting customers to either sign up or using a rewards card is fairly easy. After that time, it would be easier to pull all their teeth out than trying to sell them the rewards card. Given that I usually started my day around 1pm, the bulk of my day featured mostly the non-traditional customer period.
To add more to this circumstance, when I arrived each day, I was placed either at the end register where hardly anybody ever goes or right to the customer service desk. Each of these locations had their flaws. The furthest register usually didn’t get many customers and what customers I did get were not rewards customers and didn’t care to be. Being at the customer service desk all created problems as this was where the bulk of the customers did their returns and also tax-exempt transactions.
Now here is the problem:
Every transaction counts.
If an employee rang up a customer and they had a rewards card, they had 100% compliance.
If they rang up a second customer and they didn’t have a card, the percentage dropped to 50%.
If they rang up a third customer without a card, the percentage drops to 33%.
As you can see, the percentages can drop quickly without having quite a few rewards cards entered. I know some of the employees did cheat by randomly entering a rewards card info just to keep their percentages up. Since returns and tax-exempt transactions are usually not associated with rewards cards, this drops the percentage significantly as well. Of course at the end of the day, with several returns and not many rewards cards, it becomes quite obvious that the percentage is significantly low. So low to the point that by the end of a day, daytime employees averaged around 60% or better, while I was constantly in the drain with about 30% (or even lower) on average.
However, to the dumbass managers like Shawn Nichols, this not only was unacceptable, but found it to be punishable, to the point of writing me up several times and eventually was a probable cause of my termination. Every time I was written up, I questioned whether they was able to look at an hour-by-hour breakdown of my numbers to prove my point that the numbers dwindled by the type of customers that came in at night. Either the manager was not interested in doing so or was unable to do it. I believe the former was the excuse, not the latter.
Since I worked the same type of shift during my entire employment with Staples, it was only Shawn Nichols who really had a real issue with these numbers. Other managers in the past expressed some concern, but after I explained everything about the types of customers, the managers backed off and didn’t discuss it again. It was quite obvious that Shawn Nichols had more axes to grind than just the card numbers.
One thing I want to point at this time is that it was that the rewards cards was used as the excuse as to my termination. This excuse cost me my ignorant lawyer as he did not wish to pursue the case because of this flimsy reason. I will have more to say about this in a future post. Ironically, Staples later used other even more hysterically funny lame excuses as to reasons for my termination.
Up Next: Quotas – We Got That
No comments:
Post a Comment