Okay, so I was in the Famous Big Box Hardware Store yesterday, trying to check out 16 lag screws, a saw blade, and three bags of potting soil. I was trying to do this at the register in the garden center, since it is bad ergonomics to carry bags of dirt around in the store.

The poor clerk was friendly enough, but struggling. First, she didn’t know what a lag screw was. She pulled out a book of bar codes, but the supposed bar code for my screws wouldn’t scan. She was persistent, if nothing else. She spent the better part of 15 minutes scanning, rescanning, and then cancelling out various lengths of lag screws from my order.

Naturally, being Memorial weekend, the store was busy. A line soon formed behind me, with a lot of annoyed people in it, each of which I suppose had a shopping cart full of expensive garden items. Someone will have to train me on the question of whether it is part of the training in this place to allow a long line to develop over a 15 dollar order.

Finally we had to give up. She scanned in my dirt (it makes me grit my teeth to have to pay for dirt, but that is a side issue), the saw blade had a bar code so no problem, and she told me to go up front to buy the lag screws. So I took my items, including the not-paid-for seven dollar bag of lag screws into the parking lot, loaded my dirt, and went back in to finish the transaction. Being the nice guy I am I could have easily thrown them into the back of the van and shoplifted them, but I did not.

So the situation was: The multi-billion-dollar advertising campaign to get me into that store instead of their fierce competitor was successful. I and a lot of other people were standing in line with items selected and credit cards out to pay them money. This means at least at some level the merchandising people had done their jobs. But the whole system fell apart because the clerk at the point of sale was not competent to check me out, causing customer annoyance. The clerk in the front of the store, having more experience with hardware, had no problem using the same book to scan me out.

So the defect is “customer annoyance”. Let’s check the “Witter Index”

It is not going too far out on a limb to say that the clerk was untrained, disengaged, and there were low expectations. Three points.

System functionality? Somewhere between half-assed and idiotic. I would give this one five points. Hardware is hard to sell, because there are a lot of SKUs, the inventory is hard to stock accurately, the profit margin is minimal, and there are inventory slippage issues, but keep in mind that I was in the store in the first place buying the hardware, and bought the much higher margin dirt as a sort of after-thought.

Add to this the fact that there was an empty cash register with no clerk right next to us in line in the garden center.

Infrastructure and resources? Well, in the correct hands, the bar code book was able to accurately check me out, so that appeared to be fine, except there may have been some bar code reader issue. We don’t have complete information, but it looks like the infrastructure was basically okay, 2 points.

So the Witter Customer Annoyance Index was 30. Anything over 25 is considered dysfunctional. We know that this is enough to cause customers to be ticked off. We know that by doing some basic training, and hiring an engaged employee, we might have had better luck. At this point, the problem is owned by management. This particular store is notorious for bad service.

Lessons in mediocrity are everywhere.

In my little home town, back in the stone age, the local hardware store was owned by the mayor, and his daughter, who everyone called “Sissy” operated the front counter. She was tall, and very attractive in a rather flamboyant way. In her place, she knew where every nut, bolt and 4X1/4 inch lag screw was, and how much it cost, and if nothing else, she was entertaining, because she called everybody “sweetheart.” I believe the old farmers used to drive an extra mile or two to see Sissy because it gave them an attachment to the place. They had customer loyalty.

She was highly trained, engaged, motivated to get you into the store and collect a little of your money, and the system, which was in her brain, was sufficient to give you customer satisfaction. But, she did not have potting soil. Dirt was available for free in those days, and so was cow manure, for that matter. Bar codes were still about 20 years away from being invented. She could pay the rent selling nuts and bolts. Actually, she did not have to pay rent, since she owned the building and her dad also owned a foundry in another part of town that made the manhole covers for the city (conincidentally).

Is it better now? There is some doubt. Sometimes you miss Sissy.

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