Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Threads

Little shopping horrors

From icky dressing rooms to perky greeters, some stores seem like they're trying to annoy shoppers. It's enough to drive a paying customer to buy online.

By SHARON FINK
Published September 30, 2006

	[Times illustration: Rossie Newson]

Even those of us who consider clothes shopping as necessary as breathing are finding it harder to venture out to stores without the theme from Jaws playing in our heads.

Danger - or at least really annoying things - lurks everywhere: Customer service that is either nonexistent or smothering. Dressing rooms with lighting copied from a police interrogation room. Return policies that really are no-return policies.

No one should be surprised by people who do all their shopping on the Internet, especially considering how frustrating going to a store has become, whether the issue is one that everyone can identify with bad dressing room lighting or a pet peeve (mine is the specialty-chain-store greeter lurking right inside the door, programmed to say hi, ask me how I am and if I need help, and recite all the sales promotions - followed by more salespeople approaching in 30-second intervals with the same spiel).

The Internet as competition and information source is pushing retailers to become more responsive to what shoppers want. Today we convene our own little focus group to tell them what makes us feel like fins are circling us in the shopping waters. To get insight into these issues from the other side - to make us a little more understanding, if not accepting - we talked to Bart Weitz, a University of Florida marketing professor and the executive director of UF's Miller Center for Retailing Education and Research.

1. Few things send us fleeing a place faster than the smothering greeter found mostly at specialty chain stores - listen up, Bath & Body Works, Victoria's Secret, the Gap, New York & Co. - and her equally smothering cohorts.

"Retailers think that most people find that this greeter is providing a sort of personal touch that most customers like," Weitz said. "They also want you to feel this is a personal shopper like in a small specialty store, who can help you find stuff and then suggest things, get you to buy more things than you normally would."

I'll admit to not being immune to this lure in the right circumstances. I recently strode into the Abercrombie & Fitch in Tampa's International Plaza early on a weekday morning with one objective. A few steps in, a young woman said "Hi" and gave a short pitch for their new stovepipe jeans. A subconscious desire kicked in, and I made a beeline for the jeans. When I left, it was with the jeans and not what I had gone there for.

Three things on the conscious level that motivated me to buy: Her pitch was short, she didn't then follow me around the store and I didn't encounter any other hovering help.

2. Just as frustrating are the salespeople who are never around when you want them. Or are around but appear to be more interested in talking loudly with their colleagues about their personal lives and gripes about work.

"It's very hard to hire and train people that are appropriately sensitive to what you want and be there when you want to have them," Weitz said. "That's a skill not all people have. And (in some stores), people are not at the higher end of the wage scale."

3. It's not inspiring to buy clothing when the racks are so tightly packed that we can't pull out one piece without first hurting ourselves and then pulling out five other pieces with it.

Two motivations are behind rack-packing, Weitz said: "Retailers don't want to have to restock the racks frequently, so they stick everything out there at once. . . . (And) the theory is that the more things they have out there, the more chance there is of finding something you like."

But the trend is going toward reasonably packed racks, he said. Retailers have learned from cohorts such as Target that if they give customers room to move - the clothes and themselves in the aisles - those customers have a better experience and return more often.

4. Also not inspiring is dressing room lighting that seems designed to make us look as bad as possible in the clothes we're trying on.

"I don't know what the answer (to that) is," Weitz said. "Certainly I don't think retailers do (bad lighting) deliberately. They just haven't thought through it . . . They have some sort of theory of what dressing rooms should be like. They don't actually talk to real people about it."

5. At a time when we open ourselves up to identity theft and other crimes every time we divulge personal information, it's uncomfortable being asked for our home phone number during checkout without an explanation - and annoying when the person at the register gets snippy when we decline to give it.

Stores do this so they can send you special offers and coupons.

"It's sort of like in the old days, you used to go to the . . . department store where somebody knew your personal preferences, the style of clothing you like, and they'd call you up when something came in you might like," Weitz said.

If you're nervous about giving out your information but still want the offers, Weitz said, limit it to retailers you trust. And here's our tip: Write down the information requested and show it to the person at the register, then tear up what you wrote it on.

6. Because clothes buying isn't a science, you'll lose my business with a restrictive return policy like Forever 21's, which allows returns only for exchanges and store credits, meaning you don't get your money back if you don't want something.

This is the return policy of the future, Weitz said. There are two reasons: Returns are expensive for retailers, and people returning stolen merchandise "happens more frequently than you can imagine."

"Retailers are trying to be a bit more aggressive in reducing the number of returns but still keeping customers happy," he said. "Retailers are being much more conscious of who their good customers are and who their bad customers are. If they find somebody who returns something they buy (often), they will try to . . . get them to go to another store."

(Note to retailers: One way to reduce returns is to have better dressing room setups, lighting included. Some of us would rather buy clothes, try them on at home and return what we don't want than be freaked out in your dressing room.)

If you have a bad experience at a store, complain. It will make an impression, Weitz said, because most people don't do it, so retailers never really understand what they're doing wrong.

There is one way to make sure that you'll have a good shopping experience more often than not: Be loyal to a select few stores.

"They'll know you better and treat you better," Weitz said.

Our tip: Make at least one of your stores a small specialty store with a dedicated staff. My favorite is Deborah Kent's in Tampa. That's like shopping to Sinatra.

[Last modified September 29, 2006, 10:47:15]