By
Bob Phibbs
Updated July 14, 2025.
Retailers spent the past five years chasing innovation: AI integrations, data dashboards, customer journey mapping, you name it. But while the tools evolved, the people using them in the stores did not.
Walk into any struggling store and you’ll find the same problems we had before the pandemic:
- Associates who can’t engage a stranger
- Managers who avoid coaching
- A team that confuses task completion with selling
Turnover: A Culture That Resets Every 90 Days
According to Mercer’s 2024 Workforce Turnover Survey, retail still suffers from one of the highest turnover rate at 24.9%. You're likely rehiring for the same role every three months. Try building a consistent sales culture on that foundation.
What’s worse, 20% of hourly employees quit within the first 45 days, and only 12% of employees agreed that their organization has a good onboarding program.
Sound familiar?
Sales Floor: Still the Weakest Link
While retailers pour resources into AI, few are seeing frontline benefits. A 2024 McKinsey Retail Pulse noted that while tech is the top investment area, just 27 percent reported improved employee performance because of it .
AI won’t fix a lack of coaching or connection. It often exposes what's broken.
What are the biggest overall sales problems in the retail industry?
1. Disrupted supply chain. One problem for retailers is that they are out of stock on merchandise that customers want to purchase. Spot shortages of popular products and a drop-off in demand have also meant forecasting inventory levels will be hard.
2. Tariffs. Whether some are on again or off again, one thing is certain, prices are going up for retailers and American consumers.
3. Increased returns. Returns were already a problem for online retailers, but CNN Business reported that holiday returns cost retailers 50% more than the previous year.
4. Unmotivated employees. The Work Institute’s Retention Report stated that more than 3 of 4 employees who quit could have been retained by employers. 22% left due to a lack of career development (training), 12% left for work-life balance, and 11% left because of Their Manager's behavior. Money was not in the top three reasons.
5. Untrained employees. Because retail managers now focus more on task completion than on leading retail associates to increase the conversion rate of lookers to buyers, their untrained employees on the sales floor can only sell what they can afford.
But let’s get to the biggest reason for sales problems and that is the owners’ and managers’ aversion to the actual word selling.
And that’s too bad.
Nothing happens until a product or service is sold and money is exchanged.
You can have all the social media likes you want, all the influencer marketing you can handle, have a sophisticated marketing plan to attract customers, and have the prettiest stores in the world, but unless someone gives you money, you have a hobby and not a business.
For customers, poor service on the sales floor - on the phone or even online - is often considered the biggest sales problem. And while many retailers say they provide great customer service, customers do not get the service they feel they deserve. It may seem obvious, but retailers must provide excellent customer service to attract customers back to the store and boost sales.
Where does bad customer service start?
Poor, non-existent, or artificial greetings. Survey after survey has revealed shoppers do, in fact, want to be greeted in-store. But if you make the mistake of yelling, “Hi. How are you today?” across the store, their mumbled response might give you a clue that that doesn’t work.
Especially when someone is 30 feet from the other person trying to get their attention.
Remember, a customer coming into your store nowadays, when they could have already purchased whatever you sell online, is already committed to making a purchase. You must care for them, not treat them as something you must deal with.
I know someone who identifies a product they want online, then calls ahead to the mall to find out which entrance/exit the store is closest to, in order to minimize the time spent among the mall crowds.
This person is not necessarily a browser, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be enticed to browse once in your four walls if you make them feel comfortable.
This is where training must teach nuance. If every salesperson they come near just asks how you are, they may be inclined to make their single purchase and hightail it out.
Desperation. We’ve all been in a shop where the employee was so anxious and desperate to make a sale that they were doing more harm than good. Did you see we just got this in? Are you local? Did you see our sale over there? I call it "greeting with dollar signs in your eyes."
Judging who can afford it. We all remember that story about Oprah Winfrey trying to buy a purse in Switzerland when the clerk refused to show it to her, saying, “It’s too expensive.”
Whether it is said or not, traditional retailers' employees often try to gauge whether someone is just kicking tires or ready to buy. And that goes beyond those who are paid on commission. It is thought that someone who comes in and asks for something will be a quicker or easier sale than someone who just wants to look.
But the money is in the looking. I recently heard from one of our SalesRX users that one of his employees had made a sale with 72 add-on items in addition to the one item the customer had initially specified as all he wanted.
Rote. After making the same sales presentation hundreds of times, your associates will make assumptions and sound like they’re delivering a weather report devoid of anything resembling enthusiasm or passion; even if they really like the product, their delivery comes off as rote.
Without adding the thrill of the purchase, the shopper often passes.
These are industry-wide problems, but what is actually happening with you and your store?
The In‑Store Advantage Still Delivers
Brick‑and‑mortar remains relevant—if executed correctly.
A July 2024 EY Future Consumer Index found that 57 percent of shoppers want to see, touch, and feel products before buying, and 68 percent seek expert advice on high-value items .
These are committed shoppers. If they walk out without buying, that’s your failure, not theirs.
The Sales Floor: Still the Weakest Link
While retailers invest resources in AI, few are seeing tangible benefits on the frontline. A 2024 McKinsey Retail Pulse noted that while tech is the top investment area, just 27 percent reported improved employee performance because of it .
AI won’t fix a lack of coaching or connection. It often exposes what's broken.
You can have the best store layout and systems, but unless someone engages the customer properly, you're renting space.
How to determine the reason for problems in your retail stores
- Identify pain points in your customer experiences. Use social media customer complaints, out-of-stocks, and visual cues from shoppers as they interact with your staff.
- Review your POS numbers, including the average ticket of associates, units per transaction, and returns.
- Examine sales of entry-level price points versus mid-price and premium items to understand if associates are selling down to shoppers.
Now that you’ve identified them, how do you correct them?
Best ways to overcome problems in retail selling in your stores
- Examine your company's position on selling, not just in your stores but online. If selling isn’t a focus and you continue to shy away from using the word, you’ll never address the struggle to sell.
- Go beyond year-over-year sales and UPT to allocate labor based on traffic, not transactions to avoid unintended selling problems.
- Increase brand loyalty by elevating your associates to sales professionals. Customers who like your company because of your crew’s service skills are more likely to shop with you more often; getting them back into your store will be cheaper and even easier to get those customers to rave about you.
- Go out of your way to hire trainable people who like your company. Selling is nothing more than a transfer of feeling; I can easily share it with you because I feel good about my company.
- Properly train staff daily to improve customer service. This is one of the most crucial challenges retail industry leaders must address. Improve every single person’s selling techniques beyond trying to close a sale to building customer loyalty through engaging and serving them. I have a program of over 100 online lessons to teach your staff how to easily engage a stranger, enjoy their job more, and become more valuable to you here.
- At every meeting, actively work on how to put the customer at the center of your customer service.
- Do the work.
What Winning Retail Looks Like in 2025
Top retailers do this:
- Hire for trainability and people skills, not availability or "previous experience."
- Teach staff to approach, connect, and build trust
- Empower managers to coach daily, not just schedule
- Measure success with conversion rates, average ticket, units per transaction, and return rates
- Reinforce that great experiences drive sales
In Sum
Unlike Amazon, shoppers come into your store because they want boundaries. They want a curated experience. They want to browse. To consider. To ignore the buzz of their phones.
That’s not a whim. That’s a commitment.
And the moment they walk through your door, your team has one job: connect.
An associate should be trained well enough that any shopper welcomes a conversation and trusts them enough to buy.
AI can’t do that.
It can’t fix poor greetings, passive teams, or managers who stopped leading. But a trained, confident, and coached team can.
Retail has always been about discovery. Yes, the shopper may come in looking for one thing, but they're always open to finding something more. That’s the power of brick-and-mortar. If they just needed “a thing,” they would have stayed online.
So if they walk in and leave empty-handed, that’s not on them. That’s on you.
And in this economy, you can’t afford many of those.
Look at your own beliefs about selling. Rethink who you’re hiring. Reinforce the behaviors that build trust and drive revenue.
Because in 2025, if you aren’t actively selling, you’re slowly disappearing.
