By MARK ALBRIGHT, Times Staff Writer
Published April 9, 2006
Wrestling with a cart full of building materials, William Acousti got fed up with the long, unmoving line at a Pinellas Park Lowe's.
His complaint unleashed a rebuttal : "You're just going to have to get used to it," said a frazzled clerk. "This is the new American way."
"I was stunned," said the one-time chief executive of an industrial supply company. "We used to make customer service the top priority. Now they make you feel out of place if you say anything."
Self-service checkout. Big-box stores sparsely staffed by people who know little about the merchandise except where it's supposed to be. A wait to ask a simple question; if it's complicated, a longer wait - or, horrors, the dreaded press-one-if-you-have-an-installation-question Answer Desk phone.
Experts gathered at GlobalShop, a recent store planning and design exhibition, offered retailers a reality check on the ever-changing State of the Store.
The sobering picture: customer service marks nationally are dismal, shopper loyalty has evaporated and many retailers are struggling to please customers whose expectations have been raised sharply in this age of instant Internet information.
"This is not a good time to be a store," said Jim Taylor, a business futurist and former director of Yankelovich Partners. "It won't be for several years because we are just begining to understand how the nature of transactions is being transformed."
Multiple forces are squeezing store retailers today. The pressure to compete with low price discounters like Wal-Mart diverted billions of dollars from the sales floor to backstage logistics to catch up. It's made more stores look alike, sell the same stuff and skimp on the sales help. Meanwhile, the Internet is changing how people make buying decisions.
It's far beyond online shopping, which after 10 years is less than 5 percent of merchandise sales. Rather the Internet has become an immediate source of product information and communication for the two-thirds of shoppers who have a computer. On the Internet, they are in charge. In a store, they are at the mercy of clerks whose employers left them ill-equipped to cope with the new reality.
A New York consultant who advises retailers on technology, David Polinchock, said his pet peeve is clerks forced to say "our computer won't let us do that."
"I go to barnesandnoble.com and I am in control," he said. "I can instantly look up anything by author, title or subject and summon reviews. But if I go to the store, I can't do anything but browse unless I hunt down and wait for a clerk. They won't let me touch the computer. Why go to the store?"
The encouraging news is many big retail chains are finally turning their attention back to customer service by redefining their store experience. Many are trying to get out of Wal-Mart's path by moving to more upscale environments and merchandise that appeals to affluent shoppers. Others are adapting technology to speed up store tasks. A few chains are even hiring more sales help and training them in traditional customer service tactics.
Stores had to do something. Most shoppers today agree customer service continues to deteriorate. Fifty percent say it's getting worse and 80 percent say it's not getting better, according to surveys by BIG Research, a Worthington, Ohio, research firm that found shoppers so unforgiving they vote with their feet.
Surveys found 88 percent of shoppers blame the store for the sin of a single employee. And 86 percent quit shopping there after a third offense.
"It's so bad I stop going to a store now after the first time I am treated poorly," said Norm Russick, a New Port Richey insurance agent whose one-strike-and-you're-out philosophy is shared by 17 percent of shoppers.
"The bad news for retailers is the high-value shopper who's less concerned with price is the one who's most disgusted," said Joe Pilota, vice president of BIG Research. "Retailers spent a lot making checkout faster, but customers want more help."
Sixty-eight percent of shoppers in BIG's survey yearn for knowledgeable, helpful, courteous, friendly and caring staff. Only 5 percent see a need for faster checkout.
The top reasons for bolting a store: rude behavior or sales clerks who cannot be found or flat-out ignore shoppers. Many resent tighter return policies or antitheft tactics that make them feel like crooks.
"Stores trained customers not to be loyal by offering them no reason to be loyal," said Lee Carpenter, chief executive officer of Design Forum, a Scottsdale Ariz., research and retail architecture firm. "The Internet empowered them and they know it. They try to live rich, but still talk poor. How else can you explain a Honda Accord outfitted with the latest GPS system. They shop Tiffany on Saturday, Costco on Sunday and buy luxury goods on eBay Sunday night."
The strategies du jour ? Automate store tasks that customers actually appreciate. Find shelter in a niche to develop a brand with a more affluent following. Be poised to spend big to catch up with technology as the Internet and wireless worlds coalesce.
Retailers know that most purchases decisions are rooted in word-of-mouth endorsements from friends, neighbors or relatives. But the Internet and the explosion of wireless gadgetry as communications vehicles changed the way people build and interact with a circle of friends. It's undermining all forms of advertising.
Retailers watch customers shop while sharing every detail of what they're looking at on cell phones, through picture phone transmissions and text messages. They're terrified of wireless devices that empower shoppers to comparison shop by scanning a bar code right in the aisles.
They have seen how a technology misstep can turn a prosperous business into an endangered one with blinding speed.
"Anybody been to a record store lately?" Polinchock asked. "The arrogant record companies insisted customers wanted only albums. They said Napster downloads were piracy, not a reflection of consumer demand. Then iTunes proved that once the music fan was in control, they really wanted to create their own album. And they are happy to pay for it one song at a time."
Music stores, he said, should become venues for promoting music, not warehouses of CDs or DVDs that can be sold by download.
As another way to win customers is create a new experience. So many retailers are toying with new versions of small stores.
Laguna Drugstores in California is a nontraditional mix of a neighborhood pharmacy, floral shop, a stationary store and a Hallmark-style gift shop. Maytag has an experimental shop where customers bring their laundry to find out which washer gets their clothes cleaner rather than a bewildering line-up of look-alike machines.
Sheldon Gordon, co-creator of the Forum Shoppes in Las Vegas, plans to open his Epicenter this year in a vacant department store in Columbus, Ohio.
There is no inventory. Rather he is renting dozens of flashy showrooms to entrepreneurs who demonstrate a constantly changing array of new fashions and products. Orders are filled by mail.
"In the future, nuance and novelty are going to more important," said Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind , who argues creative people will have an edge over left brain thinkers as the world becomes more automated. "Wal-Mart is imitating Target because it's hit the wall as a purveyor of the routine."
Shopping is a secondary reason why young people congregate in malls on weekends. But finding experiences that resonate with today's tech savvy shopper remains elusive.
"My daughter has been on a computer almost since she was born and she is used to carrying around 12 gadgets at the same time," Polinchock said. "I guarantee you she will be living in a wearable computer system as an adult. She'll laugh about that clunky laptop her old man lugged around."
