For the past several years, office supply stores have been doing their level best to swirl round the porcelain bowl with the three major players Staples and OfficeDepot/OfficeMax leading the way through the bog and into a rather nasty oblivion.
After their many years of complaining about consumers coming in and “showrooming” the products to then order them online cheaper, you’d think that they might realise that their online competition (*COUGH* *COUGH* Amazon *COUGH) as the existential threat to their business that it is and step up their in-store game to make it worth your while to actually visit them.
My last two visits to Staples for small packets of envelopes would seem to suggest otherwise.
I don’t use enough envelopes for general postal use here at The Nerdery to justify getting a big box of 500 of them.
Likewise, I rarely print checks and customer invoices to need more than 20 #8 or #9 windowed envelopes on hand at any given time.
The less said about the taste of gummed envelopes the better…give me the tape you peel off the sealing glue which paranoid l’il me will add a second run of cellophane tape along the seam to ensure the relatively weak glue doesn’t give way in the sorting machines of the US Postal Service.
So imagine my surprise when I saw rows and rows of huge boxes of envelopes but precious few of the much smaller boxes of peel-and-seal envelopes and then only #10 non-windowed envelopes at that.
Today’s trip into a different Staples right next to where Katie works was even less successful on the envelope front.
So is it any wonder why the online retailers are not only eating the traditional office supply store’s lunch, they’re shaking them by the ankles for all of their lunch money to boot?
Had it not been for an actually decent price on packing tape which had been depleted by a recent neighbour’s house move up the hill to Wendell, I wouldn’t have bothered sticking around to see how much of a disaster the rest of the store would be.
As I’m wandering through the aisles, two employees were engaged in a loud conversation near the checkout tills that seemed to have little to do with the business of offering office supplies at retail.
That conversation kept going for the ten minutes it took me to walk the store and then finally approach the tills to purchase the packing tape. Not that it was at all obvious which till I should approach because there’s no indicator as to which one is active and all of them were covered with bags or boxes or stuff I couldn’t even identify and the two loud employees were nowhere near a till to give me a hint.
It takes them two minutes to have enough situational awareness to realise that someone had approached the general area of the tills with an item in hand and that’s when one of them asked me “are you ready to check out?” with a very disinterested vibe.
Oh dear, we’re not off to a good start if a *REALLY STUPID QUESTION* is the first thing that comes to mind rather than some sort of greeting that would be simultaneously respectful and offer the customer some hope that their patronage is actually appreciated.
A human being with at least one product the store sells in hand is standing near the checkout tills where the sales transaction takes place. I’m thinking a chimpanzee and two trainees could work out for themselves what the customer is hoping will happen in the very near future.
She somewhat dismissively waves me over to one of the debris-littered checkout till stations that wasn’t obviously active to even a casual observer which made me rather thankful I only had the one item as it would have taken a fair bit of effort to clear the area for efficient ringing up of the products.
Unfortunately, once the stupid question train pulls out of the station, it’s really hard to stop that train and the young lady who was apparently already bored with me shovels lots of coal into the engine to get it really roaring down the tracks with “did you find everything?”
OK, confession time here…that question and variations on it are a retail pet peeve of mine for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that not only is it impossible for me to find everything, I wasn’t trying to find everything because my current financial state would not allow me to purchase everything even if I could find it.
But once you get past the absurdity of how she phrased that question if not utter abuse of basic logic and common sense, then you get to the two other problems I have with it:
- Option 1 is that I have in my possession all of the items that I intend to purchase and that items I have no need of purchasing are still on the shelves and not in my basket/trolley/hands. I understand that retailers love the “suggest sell” method but it comes off as insulting to people who know exactly what they need or want and would like nothing more to get in, get on with it, get it over with, and get out (with apologies to Danny Kaye).
- Option 2 is that if I don’t have a particular item I actually wanted with me at checkout, there’s a better-than-average chance I’ve ready searched for it and didn’t find it in stock and came to the conclusion it wasn’t available for purchase during this visit or confirmed that it is not in inventory with an employee.
Perhaps if she’d phrased the question to better reflect what I think Staples would have wanted her to convey along the lines of “was there something you were wishing to purchase that you couldn’t locate or that we could order for you?”, I might have felt inclined to point out that small packages of #8 and #9 peel-and-seal envelopes would be lovely and explore the available options with her.
But her attitude pretty much from beginning to end of the transaction was at best indifferent and at times bordering on actual hostility that I’d dared to interrupt her far more important conversation with her colleague by having the temerity to purchase something.
These are the times that I really miss arguably one of my favourite jobs that you’d never see on my resume which was being paid a small stipend as a secret shopper to see if I could catch retail employees not performing at their very best in terms of customer service.
I can guarantee you that the report on her would have been scathing and ended by recommending that if she couldn’t be bothered to show a customer even a modicum of basic courtesy that her rank would imply as part of her duties that perhaps she should be reduced in rank or shown the door straightway if she had been truly belligerent.
But it’s hard to hold her to account for her behaviour when her colleague was very obviously the manager on duty and was perfectly content to allow her to treat her customer like an unwelcome intrusion upon her day. Both of them are apparently very secure in their positions that they can do as they wish whilst on duty and not suffer any consequences for poor customer service.
That sort of rotten behaviour often starts from the top with what management is willing to tolerate and the example they set is the one their employees will often mimic.
The part that kills me is that Staples was generally the much cleaner and nicer office supply store compared to OfficeDepot/OfficeMax and the quality of interactions with the employees was also generally better.
I think that pretty much kills any desire I have to go to a big box office supply store again unless I’m truly desperate for something that I can’t wait a day or two to be shipped from an online retailer.
These big box stores can’t have it both ways: they can’t complain about the expenses of operating and stocking expensive retail spaces that customers aren’t visiting unless they have no other choice but then turn round and treat the customers who do actually walk through the door with utter contempt!
That’s a vicious cycle they cannot possibly win and it seems clear from the industry trends that they’re clearly not winning that fight against swirling down the whirlpool caused when one flushes the loo.
What a pity.
You guys have got to at least make the appearance of trying or you’re just asking to be the next companies that would have been featured on a very notorious website that chronicled business failures (which unfortunately met the same fate as a couple of my previous employers as well as the many companies they featured with the stories of their demise).