Prescient retail

What if there were a store that knew everything you wanted before you got there, and all of it was waiting for your arrival, ready to go?

It sounds like some parallel universe you may not have yet experienced, but it may well be in a future just up the road.

I first witnessed a stage 1 example of this kind of “no-shop shopping” at Bed Bath and Beyond, which allows customers to select and purchase merchandise in any of its stores, but then has everything ready at any other Bed Bath store anywhere in the country. It’s a service near and dear to the hearts of parents of college students, allowing them to make all the in situ summer selections of sheets, wastebaskets, pots, pans, and bath mats for the far-away dorm room or college apartment—ready and waiting for the start of the fall semester. In this example, the shopper still needs to shop a store, but is able to do so in a more leisurely way, when product availability is high, tension low, and move-in deadlines don’t loom—and simply shift the pick-up to another time and place.

A more recent entry is mygofer.com, a new venture from Sears Holdings Corporation, which allows customers to shop online for groceries, electronics, apparel and more, and then pick up the designated items at a My Gofer store the same day—presumably a defunct Sears or Kmart location, now re-purposed as the bridge between the online and bricks and mortar worlds. This service also offers a delivery option and guarantees product availability.

Interestingly, these hybrids acknowledge an important positive of the traditional retail experience—in one case, the customer desire to see and touch the merchandise, and in the other, the need for immediate gratification. At the same time, they both endeavor to minimize what consumers don’t want—crowded aisles, vapid sales associates, out-of-stocks, and long waits at the checkout.

Inherent in these new constructs, however, is the sad element of partly throwing in the towel on some negatives of the in-store experience, with the retailer now at least tacitly admitting it may no longer be able to heal all of thyself.

Seduced and abandoned

In days gone by (any time before the current recession), the shopping cart was a customer’s rolling possession holder, containing all the selections that were as good as bought and paid for. With its vertical bars, the cart gave off a warning to other shoppers to keep out, contents contained within this high-security traveling metal fencing are “my stuff.” At the same time, each product placed within the cart represented the shopper’s (almost) solemn commitment to purchase—nothing would leave the cart until checkout. Sure, once in a great while you might see a vaguely embarrassed customer beg off an item at checkout—to the tsk-tsks, tut-tuts and clucking sounds of others in the queue, a chorus of muses who sensed some important cosmic code of shopping conduct had been violated. But mostly, the mighty mobile fortress simply served as the shopper’s purchase conveyance until their items could be taken out to the parking lot and put in the car.

No more. In a recent study we did for a large retail chain, upwards of 500 items were abandoned every day in each of the stores we were in, relegated to a corral of carts in the corner whose sole purpose was to house these rejected products (looking rather forlorn, anthropomorphically speaking, like abandoned puppies at a shelter). A cottage industry sprang up in the stores to sort and re-stock these “re-shops”—a thankless, never-ending task for the associates. Clearly, customers had exploded the idea that moving an item from the shelf into their cart represented any kind of implied purchase agreement.

Yesterday’s New York Times featured an article on abandonments in the online shopping world, highlighting a new web service which remarkets to those who might put an item in their electronic “cart,” but not finish the transaction. It’s an interesting approach to nudging people to re-consider, but certainly loaded with complications, not the least of which is the highly intrusive annoyance factor.

Perhaps the customer contract in bricks-and-mortar retailers will be re-initiated, and shoppers will once again follow the age-old Cafeteria Rule—take all you want and eat (buy) all you take. Or we may be witnessing something that has already changed forever—good or bad economy notwithstanding—the cart as nothing more than a carriage of considerations.

The camera never lies...

...but lots of people do, especially when they’re talking to researchers or otherwise responding to surveys. A part of it might be attributable to the Lake Wobegon effect, from the mythical town of Garrison Keillor, where it is said all the children are above average. More technically, another driver is social desirability bias. This is where the respondent wants to provide an answer that will be looked at by others as favorable.

• A recent poll asked Americans who they voted for in the last election. This poll showed Obama thrashing McCain by more than 20 percentage points -- far greater than the actual Obama margin of victory on Election Day.

• When people are asked if they voted in a presidential election, the percentage of self-reported turnout is inevitably 10-20 percent higher than actual turnout.

• About 40 percent of Americans say that they attend church regularly. Counting and tracking methodologies used to determine true church attendance found that about half that number can actually be found in the pews.

• A number of years ago, a survey found that upwards of five million people claimed to be New Yorker magazine readers—an unlikely number given that circulation was barely above half a million.

People want to be on the winning team, and want to look virtuous and smart. So when we ask them to self-report, we often get responses that are wildly inaccurate. Researchers are exploring tools such as anonymous online polling and expressionless computer avatars in order to obtain more accurate survey results. But no matter how sophisticated surveys become, there is no substitute for the careful capture of actual human behavior, as we do with video-enabled behavioral analytics to see into the realities of shoppers in the shopping aisles.

As Yogi Berra once said, “You can see a lot by observing.”

Retail charm offensive

Bill writes: In his early stand-up days, Jay Leno used to tell the story of the frustrations of being in line at the supermarket. He waits. And waits. And waits some more. Then it’s his turn, and the checker doesn’t even look up to say hello. She’s got her head down in scanning mode. When it’s time to pay, he – thinking he’s a valued customer at a store where he’s just forked over more than $200 – still doesn’t receive an acknowledgment. Not able to contain his frustration, he says to the checker that a simple thank you would be nice. “Why should I?” she says, scoffing, “it says it right here on the receipt.”

Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of cluelessness and rudeness in stores—maybe not quite as bad as the Leno story. I once asked a clerk to help me locate an item that was obviously not in the aisle where I sought his help—he just happened to be the only person anywhere in the store I could find. He stood very still, pivoted his head around to be able to see everything within a three-foot radius of his body, and then proudly proclaimed the item was not there. I suppose it’s not so different from being in a restaurant and asking a passing waitperson for a spoon, only to be told this isn’t their station.

Times are different. There’s a charm offensive going on everywhere. Store traffic is thin—and precious. I get a greeting like royalty as soon as I walk in almost anywhere—even big box stores, where sucking up to customers has never been part of the operational orthodoxy. Employees are now dropping what they’re doing to help and lead and show and answer—and thank. It’s all rather nice, although sometimes a bit desperate—and annoying. I was at Walgreens the other day, needing “navigational remediation” as we sometimes call it in the shopper analytics business. I was taken to the item I sought, and then given a “helpful” two-minute discourse on all the reasons why another brand would be better than my selection.

Oh well. It was better than being taken for granted.