Any time weather affects business, it is hard to deal with. Deliveries are delayed, employees may have to deal with children needing care, your utilities may not be working reliably. You need to communicate to everyone, hope for help but plan to take care of all of it yourself. Here are a few tips for retailers affected by major snowstorms:
Lesson to businesses large and small, if you want to become a larger brand, you better pay attention to the most basic brand promises:
eating our product won’t taste bad or our products won’t kill you.
Businesses must realize something has to give because the reality is, less is still less. This reminds me of another old saying I heard a lot at NRF recently, “perception is reality.” No, only reality is reality. If I perceive I’m Tom Cruise – sorry – it doesn’t make me Tom Cruise. I think that makes me delusional. Only reality is reality.
The holidays are almost here so I’ve come up with my blunt reminders for both staff and owners of specialty retailers. They’re by no means all the “Don’ts” but especially at the holidays, these 50 can make the difference between hearing, “I’ll take it,” and “I’m outta here.
What if employees got bonus scrip for filling in at short notice, or meeting an above average number of items per sale, or having the highest average sales for a week? They could use their script to not have to clean the bathroom for say 25,000 or they could buy a longer lunch, or be able to go home early and not clean up. There are thousand things you could come up with that would be rewarding great performances.
You want to bellyache about how business is off? Call your buddies and compare sob stories? Save your time and instead go out shopping to find and bring the Ashleys of the world to your store.
Point of this blog is you can spent millions on having the prettiest business but if you can’t follow that up consistently with as exceptional an experience as your fixtures, what good are you?
crowne-yellow
The next morning, the bar was reset to yellow liquid in the martini glasses. In retail you are known more for your compromises than your designs, products or store design.
The whole thing could have been averted 90 minutes prior when the one waiter was ovewhelmed, the manger could have come out and said, “We’re over our heads, can I get you some appetizers on the house or something until we get it right?” He could have jumped in and helped. By the time he approached the SVP all reason was lost. Driver personalities never want to look bad; well who does really?
And whose fault is that? A business that doesn’t see how every person directly contributes to the bottom line needs to have their collective head examined. The guy in the warehouse who knows where every single item is, can spot when a pick list is wrong and keep supplies going to customers, instead of writing backorder.
High standards each and every day ensure the right employees do the right things. Training new employees to 100% and then making them work for managers who don’t run the shifts up to high standards is spinning your company’s wheels and lowering the brand perception in customers’ eyes. That means it destroys profits. There’s only one way to avoid that: an ongoing program of mystery shops.
