Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor® blog at Retaildoc.com

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.

Sales were dropping off and the Arrow CEO saw that the trend was changing to a complete shirt. He announced to his board of directors in 1930, “We will never get there doing what we’re doing now.” That’s when something truly remarkable happened.

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal titled, Restaurants Burned by Deep Discounts, said in part, “as several chains prepare to report second quarter earnings in coming weeks, Wall Street is bracing for news that price cuts not only ate into profits but failed to bring in as many customers as hoped.  There was an 8% [...]

This problem extends into management when we don’t write people up for being late, rudeness or their inability to perform the job. Thinking like an employee cripples managers from doing their job as a merchant. We want to be “nice,” “liked,” “popular.” I had a boss one time say, “You’re only as good as your last sale.” Brutal. He was a merchant.

For example, wherever it won’t affect displays for example general lighting, replace floodlights with compact fluorescents. Just make sure the new bulb fits entirely in the old holder. Nothing looks more third-rate than a bunch of pigtail energy bulbs sticking out of a ceiling fan, wall fixture or dangling from a ceiling. But for a display to pop, there is still nothing better than a halogen spotlight.