The sun is shining and it is without a doubt the most exquisite day we’ve had all year. As a misguided press officer once said—a good day for bad news. This recession is worse than predicted and more severe than anyone expected. The Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has now said this is the deepest recession since the Second World War and the number of people out of work has risen to 2.1 million.
There seems to be a determined gear change amongst those who are intent on making cuts. One customer buys only the Basics range and it costs him £40.77. His basket includes chopped tomatoes, tins of sweetcorn, corned beef, vodka and eggs. Others are buying honey, carrots, herbs, peppers, mushrooms and mozzarella—all from the cheaper range—and vouchers and points are being used more frequently than ever before. A Polish couple seem to have emptied the shelves of the entire range. Everything in their basket is in the tell-tale white packaging with orange writing: cola, tomato ketchup, Swiss roll, chicken noodles, carrots, beans, apples, pasta, chicken kiev, pizza, sausage rolls, salmon trimmings, coleslaw, pork luncheon meat and yogurt. The grand total is £24.35, probably half of what the more expensive ranges would have cost them.
One woman tells me, ‘I’m an impulse buyer and a place like this is quite dangerous for me, especially since you now do all these clothes, DVDs, books and videos—I’m going to end up broke coming in here.’ She’d save a fortune if she shopped online like one of my regular customers, a mum to three boys:
‘It only cost me £100, but it was a complete disaster—I couldn’t remember everything we have and the boys just whinged because of what I had missed.’
So today her shopping costs £154. ‘I don’t mind. It’s a small price to pay for not having them all moan at me.’
A customer arrives at the till and does what many customers do. ‘Can you tell me how many points I’ve got on my card?’
‘Yes, if you give me your card, I can tell you at the end.’
‘Can’t you tell me now?’
‘Um, no, because I haven’t swiped your card yet, for one. And two, I need to put something on your bill to be able to take something off your card.’ She looks totally confused and affronted. I don’t expect her to understand the entire transaction process, but this is not complex physics. ‘It’s the same logic as at the bank: give me your card and I’ll tell you what you’ve got. Until you give it to me to scan, how can I tell you?’ It takes another minute before it clicks.
Heat does a funny thing to our heads. We experience it so infrequently that, when it arrives, we rip our clothes off, throw back more drinks and go on shopping binges. The Barbecue Bunch are buying meat, BBQ utensils, coal, salad, strawberries and wine by the gallon. One couple who haven’t done their weekly food shop yet spend £121.26 on this stuff. They contemplate for a few moments putting back the extra £12 they’ve spent on DVDs for their eighteen-month-old before deciding, ‘At least it’ll keep him busy while we do the barbecue.’
After my break I serve an old lady with severely twisted fingers and chronic arthritis. It’s so bad she can’t pack, can’t take her cash out and can’t put her change back. I help her pack, take the money out and put the change back in her purse for her. I wonder how she will get her shopping into her house—and how she copes generally. ‘I know what you’re thinking, love,’ she suddenly says. ‘Don’t worry about me, I get by, I rely on the kindness of strangers.’
I’ve lost count of the number of times a Mr or Mrs Elderly has been ‘holding up’ the queue while packing their shopping slowly with arthritic hands. Meanwhile customers sigh deeply and loudly behind them. Shopping is a tense affair—this much I’ve learnt in my time here. And the dumping ground for all the tension acquired while traipsing around the store is the till. Sometimes I’m the garbage can and sometimes, sadly, it’s the customer causing the delay. I feel another letter coming on.
Dear Supermarket Giant,
Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, but are you aware that one of your key customer groups are the goldenagers?
I know you probably do a lot to make lives easier for them—I’ve seen the trolley boys who help them with their shopping to the car and we Cogs are always ready to pack for them when they want it. But these OAPs come in during the week to avoid the weekend scrum. Their jowls wobble, they are almost deaf, but somehow they still hear the crowd of unsympathetic customers exhaling noisily behind them. They punch their pin numbers in over and over again and it brings them to their rheumatism-ridden knees every time. Often it’s not because they can’t remember their numbers but because the pin-pads are not as responsive to their hands. It’s painful to watch and crushing to tell them it’s still not registered. Those wretched pin-pads are not made for eyes that have to squint hard to read instructions.
Don’t mistake me for a Help the Aged campaigner; truth be told, I find many of them ill-tempered and cantankerous, but my mum is seventy-plus and I can’t bear the thought of her going through this kind of ritual humiliation once a week. So here’s what I suggest.
Give your staff some training so they know how to handle and help them, and more importantly, how to deal with the insensitive customers queuing up behind. And make an exception on the receipt-signing issue—if they can’t remember their pin or get it right and they look old enough, just let them sign, will you? I’ve had to turn away an elderly lady who couldn’t get her pin right and didn’t have another card with her. She had spent a good hour in your store and almost two hours of her day on the shopping trip. She was happy to give you a good £40 from her pension, so why turn away her business?
Yours,
A. Cog
A woman stops off post-gym session. I can smell her from five yards away. The sixty-four-year-old man in front of her doesn’t need his school vouchers.
‘Why don’t you give my school vouchers to this…er…man…’ He turns to look at her properly. ‘Um…sorry…er…lady…um…man…’ He trails off, grabs his bags and races out of the store.
A customer arrives with a full trolley. She throws her bag down, doesn’t look at me and doesn’t respond to my hello.
‘I’ve got six bags.’ She’s still loading and I can see she’s in a hurry.
‘Should I pack for you?’ I ask. She nods. I put two sets of toilet roll packs, a bar of soap, a hand cream and cotton pads in one bag. When she has finished loading she comes back to my end of the till. She takes the bag I’ve just packed, looks at it and tuts loudly. She then empties it and starts again.
One woman gives me her coupons. ‘I’ve spent the amount it says I need to in order to get that money off,’ she tells me assertively.
‘I’m quite sure you have, but I have to check anyway. Just bear with me.’
Painstakingly I go through all £89.34 of her shopping to see if she really does have £6 worth of meat and £4 worth of fruit. It requires a lot of mental arithmetic, which I haven’t done since aged ten, and so it takes a while. She turns to the customer behind her in exasperation. ‘Can you believe that they have to check everything before they can give me my money off?’
‘They don’t in Tesco,’ says the co-customer, ‘it just comes off.’
‘I know! I won’t be doing this again. It’s so humiliating. Never again…this is really quite embarrassing.’
‘You should check the receipt too, because they always get things wrong.’
My least favourite part of this job is being ignored by customers. Second to that is when they talk about me like I’m not there. The stress makes me do my sums wrong so I give up and just put the coupons through. By the time I get to customer number 2 she’s ready to throw a grenade at me. I say hello. She ignores me. I ask her how she is. She mutters a barely audible reply. When I wind up the transaction she stands at the end and methodically checks her bill. I pretend not to notice. She leaves.
Today we have the results of our first MCM in the new financial year, and we have failed. The mystery customer did their rounds in the store, trying to get products located, observing the helpfulness of the shop-floor staff, assessing our dress code and name badges and so on. We fail because the colleague who was approached to find a product did not smile or give a warm greeting, their customer service was minimal and they didn’t offer ‘an individualised, tailored service’. The Cog at the tills apparently did the same thing—no points for the bag, distracted, and offered a basic minimal service—and I can’t help thinking that it was me. There are hand-scribbled management notes all over the report:
‘What happened here? Not a good start!’
‘Any colleagues not carrying out the right behaviours will now be named to the store manager.’ And where that would lead, nobody knows.
When I get back from my break there’s a little sign on my till saying:
‘Make consistency matter.’
Always remember the three service principles.
*Great start…smile!!!!
*Happy to serve…focused friendly tailored service
*Perfect finish…smile!!!
And never forget eye contact.
This is interspersed with lots of smiley faces.
At 5.30, it’s time for Michaela to leave. Betty tells her she has relief but Samantha is ready to send her on her way now. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll deal with Betty,’ she tells a confused-looking Michaela. Samantha stands at the end of her till like a human Closed Checkout sign, frightening the customers away. When it’s my turn Betty closes my till early and I’m out of there on the dot. She also throws in a ‘Bye, darling.’ On my way up the stairs I read the maxims on the wall again: Say goodbye. Say hello—they hardly ever bite. Be friendly. Talk to the customer. Take them to the product not the aisle. Do they want anything else? They pay our wages. Suggest an alternative. Wear your badge.