Stuck in the Christmas check out line again
December 27, 1998
As with rush hour into and out of Manhattan during the rest of the year, I've always struggled to avoid getting involved in the before and after Christmas rush, something I failed to do yesterday as we wound up in Bradley's then Home Depot.
We had different reasons for making the trip, but the result was just as aggravating, people everywhere grabbing what they could of holiday sales (though from what I gathered the crowds were not nearly as large as retailers hoped) and the lines at the registered moved monstrously slowly, as if the store owners (at least their clerks) really didn't care whether they got our money or not.
I have run into this attitude before, both at National's, a general retailer on the Garfield-Lodi border I shopped in when I lived in Passaic, and the many other numerous stores of its kind from Two Guys to Great Eastern, from Woolsworth to Korvettes, all of them now out of business.
The greater minds of business claim these places vanished because they failed to keep up with the times, new marketing techniques, new merchandizing, and perhaps The Wall Street Journal, Business Week and other such observers of business are right, but I suspect these institutions vanished because they simply couldn't get people through the cash register in a timely fashion.
Each time I shopped in these places, I found myself confronted with clerks who moved so slowly I could have gone for lunch while waiting for them to check me out. They had what I call "a bureaucratic attitude" towards the public, that same sense of indifference I ran into when I was younger and had to collect unemployment one year, as if the clerk was doing me a favor by letting me buy these things at this or that particular store.
Some of the clerks had worked the same job all their lives, becoming gray-headed during their long years of service, and sometimes rude. Watching them work from the back of the line made me want to give up my purchase and go shop in a store that actually wanted my business.
This, of course, is accompanied by other basic business conditions, such as having a dependable staff which conscientiously made sure all the items in the store were priced correctly, so as to avoid the disastrous "I need a price check on register three" which adds a half hour to the check out process, and makes for enraged customers at the rear of the line.
Over the years, management has developed numerous aids to make checkout lines move more quickly, from scanning devices to special computer codes, but even with these, many clerks move as slowly as they did before, and with even less knowledge about the products since they now depend upon a machine to tell them all they need to know.
If Woolsworth or Grants or Korvettes had thought to provide better attitudes and a staff truly dedicated to providing service, each business might well has survive, learning that the real key to business success is getting people to the cash register as quickly and efficiently as possible, a matter that seemed lacking during my excursion yesterday, but then perhaps clerks were simply weary from a long Christmas season and will be back to their proper form come January