Shopping made difficult
Insufficient staff and a long queue at the cashier counter will turn off customers.
THERE I was in a store the size of several football fields pushing two shopping carts filled with RM3,289 worth of furniture.
If you’ve ever tried carting a table, two folding chairs, two chairs, a swivelling chair, two stools, a mattress pad, a curtain rod and a fiveyear-old daughter, you’ll know that it is an exercise in futility.
Tired and frustrated, I told myself, I would never ever shop in this furniture store.
My main gripe with this store – that insists you can do it all yourself – is you have to do it all yourself.
Earlier in the self-serve warehouse, I had to lift a 46kg table from a shelf and place it on a shopping cart. At my age, mid-40s, I could have twisted my spine or gotten a heart attack.
There was no staff in sight to help me lift the table. Perhaps that is why it is called a self-serve warehouse.
The heavy lifting compoundedmy earlier frustration at the bedroom section. There was no staff in sight to help confirm whether a king-size mattress pad fits two single beds.
As I sat on a queen-size bed waiting in vain for a staff to appear, James Surowiecki’s article, The More The Merrier, in The New Yorker, came to mind.
Surowiecki, a rather clever business and finance columnist, wrote that Uniglo, the Japanese fashion chain, became successful over the past decade for two reasons.
No. 1: “Due in large part to the fact that it has found a way to sell basic stuff that is not only affordable but also stylish and durable.”
No. 2: “There’s something else that makes Uniqlo distinctive: it hires a lot of people, and spends a lot of time training them.”
(So far, my one and only shopping experience in Uniglo was pleasant. I was looking for cotton shorts and the sales assistant was helpful. I didn’t manage to find the shorts but I came away a satisfied customer.)
He wrote: “This is not the way most retailers do business. The general dogma in recent decades has been that, in order to compete in price, you need to keep labour costs down – hiring as few workers as you can get away with and paying them as little as possible.”
Although leanness, he argued, is “generally a good thing in business, too much cost-cutting turns out to be a bad strategy, not only for workers and customers but also for businesses themselves”.
The big challenge for any retailer, according to Surowiecki, “is to make sure that the people coming into the store actually buy stuff, and research suggests that not scrimping on payroll is crucial.”
To support his argument, the columnist quotes a study by Marshall Fisher, Jayanth Krishnan and Serguei Netessine published at the Wharton School. The study found that more workers in a store led to more sales.
The Fisher, KrishnanandNetessine study showed that customers’ needs are pretty simple: They want to be able to find products and helpful salespeople, easily; and they want to avoid long checkout lines.
The checkout line of the furniture store where I was shopping was also daunting. It reminded me of a checkin counter of a budget airline. I had to wait for 30 minutes formy turn to pay.
In summary, Surowiecki argued that if a store did not have enough staff or if they were not well trained, customers would easily lose patience.
That was why I, whose home is 80% furnished with the store’s furniture, decided to getmy kitchen cabinets elsewhere.
When I or, to be specific, my wife, was shopping for a dream kitchen, we went to my favourite store several times. And each time the staff were either busy, absent or blur.
Frustrated, we decided to get our dream kitchen from a local furniture store. The price was slightly higher. But the staff gave us personalised attention and we did not feel harried because the store was not crowded.
We also felt that we had a “personal relationship” with the sales assistant who took our order. We could call him to change our order and he also alerted us not to pay for the purchases immediately as “the store is having a sales discount the following month”.
But one of the attractions of the furniture store the size of several football fields is I like its designs.
And they are relatively affordable. A stylish dining set does not cost the price of a Perodua Myvi.
However, a RM3,000 wardrobe that I bought two years ago looks like it is on the verge of collapse. I feel cheated. And I’m planning to replace it with a custom-made wardrobe.
I’m wondering whether my love affair with the furniture store is ending. Perhaps not.
Last night, while I was lying on a sofa at ho®me, I flipped through its catalogue on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 and I was tempted to get a chaise lounge and a kitchen trolley.