A Trip to Wonderland

I went to renew my drivers’ license this past Saturday and felt like I had just steeped through the looking glass.

When I do my training classes on customer service, I ask attendees “What state government agency is universally hated in every state?” The answer I get most often is Department of Motor Vehicles. So Saturday after four years of avoiding going to the DMV I had no choice. It was close to the end of the month and it was a Saturday. The worst possible time to renew, but I had no choice; my license was going to expire on Sunday. Reluctantly I went and I was prepared for the worst.

As I pulled up to the main DMV office – the only one open on the weekend, I saw empty parking spaces. My first thought was that the DMV was now closing early in response to budget cuts. I even started to drive past the DMV when I noticed a couple of people walk in the door. I was shocked. Things looked strange and were getting stranger. It was almost as if I had seen a fully dressed white rabbit walking through the doors of the DMV.

I made a questionably legal U-Turn right into the parking lot to chase the rabbit and hoping no one saw that maneuver moved quickly inside the building to get lost in the crowd. As I dropped down the rabbit hole, I thought “Uh oh! Not a big enough crowd to get lost in.”

A Highway patrolman walked in the door. Was he looking for me? Like the Mad Hatter, I put my hat on, and pulled the brim down low in an effort to blend in as I joined the line to be screened.

In the DMV here, you have to be screened to move to the next level of bureaucracy. The process reminds me of the “tea party” where nothing makes sense. You have to stand in line to get permission to stand in line.

I quickly moved up in line until I was before one of the “screeners.” These are people who make sure you have all the right documentation BEFORE you get in the REAL line. In the past this line would have taken me 35 to 45 minutes on a good day. A good day would have meant being in the parking lot ten minutes before the door opens on a Wednesday in the second week of the month. On a Saturday towards the end of the month this line alone would have been a good hour plus wait.

But this line moved. It moved so fast, I couldn’t read my book because the people behind me kept telling me “the line moved.” I moved through the screen line in 13 minutes.

The attitude of the screener was different. In the past they would just hold out their hand to receive your paperwork, look at it and give you a number. You hoped they didn’t send you back home chasing some obscure piece of paper.

After receiving a service number, you would have to go and sit and wait for your number to be called. This time smiling like the Cheshire cat she greeted me, and after looking at my paperwork, called me by name and told me the renewal line was moving pretty fast and they would have me out pretty soon. Of course, though shocked she even talked to me, I didn’t believe her.

Once I got my number, I looked at the Call Board and saw there were 42 people ahead of me. Now this was more like the DMV I remembered. I sat down and started reading. I had been reading only about ten minutes when I looked up as saw there were only three people ahead of me. My first impulse was to look and see if my watch had stopped – no DMV line moves this fast. In the time it took me to check my watch and look up at the board again – MY number was up.

I looked at my watch. “Curiouser and curiouser!” I thought to myself. This can’t be real I must be dreaming because I had spent only 11 minutes waiting.

I went to the window, reviewed all my information, and paid and was told to go to the photo window. Four minutes after my number was up, I was on my way to the photo window. What happened next shocked me even more.

The clerk took my picture and then told me she thought it didn’t look good and asked my opinion of it. My head was spinning. Did I hear her right? It didn’t look good and she wanted my opinion? I thought they were trained to take bad pictures. I looked and agreed it was lousy.

Then just when you think things can’t get more shocking they do…she retook my picture FOUR TIMES until she got one we both agreed was good. Five minutes later I was walking out with a new drivers license.

I came in expecting a two to three hour exercise and walked out in a little over thirty minutes. Something had changed. What happened? The place was quiet. No one was stressed. People seemed happy. There were only two possibilities here. The first was this was the site of the first Stepford DMV operation. The second possibility was massive use of recreational drugs.

The is a third possibility that was so far fetched I didn’t even consider it until them: something has changed in the way the government does business.

It is a crazy world. Black is white. Bad is good. Corporations are now reviled for poor customer service and the DMV is the paragon of perfect customer service.

Bah Humbug!

I guess that I will be forced to address Christmas several times over the next couple of months. Today I am compelled to address it because I saw Scrooge yesterday. Yes Scrooge exists. I, like most of you, thought he was a fictional construct used as a thinly disguised metaphor representing the “de-humanizing” aspect of industrialization at the beginning of the Industrial Age.

After yesterday, I came to realize that he was real.

An explanation is in order here. I walked into a furniture store and had the pleasure (?) of witnessing the motivational session of a sales manager chastising a salesperson for arriving at the store twenty minutes late. This was a bad experience for the salesperson to be sure; but it was also a bad experience for the store on many levels.

The first level of bad was the fact there were witnesses. Unfortunately the sound acoustics in the store are very good, and the sales manager was passionate about what he had to say. So I and about seven other people got to listen to Scrooge tell the salesperson, a young woman in her mid-twenties, “Your baby sitter problem is yours. You being late is mine! I don’t give a f**k about your problem. But if you’re late again; even one second, you’re outta here!”

When something like this happens on a sales floor it poisons the buying mood of customers. Customers want shopping to be a fun and pleasant experience. What happened on the sales floor was the equivalent of a drive by shooting. All buying activity came to a halt. The seven customers in the store began browsing their way towards the door to leave. The “nervous energy” of those remaining contaminated the “buying attitudes” of the customers who came into the store after the motivational “drive by.”

I have seen this happen many times in many different stores and the results are always the same, buying slows dramatically until there has been a complete change over of customers on the floor.

The second level of bad was the effect on the salespeople. The morale of the rest of the salespeople plummeted. Being is sales is a hard job. It takes a lot for salespeople to get into that “happy place” mentally to be able to do their jobs effectively, and the sales manager just destroyed it.

The effects are salespeople are similar to an experiment I read about in a psychology class in college many years ago. It was a scientific experiment investigating the effects of motivation/de-motivation using plants.

In the experiment, there were three rooms: In the first room were two plants, the control group. These were just left alone. They were watered and fertilized automatically with no human contact. They just grew. In the second room, the two plants were watered and fertilized automatically, but each day one of the plants was talked to in a nice an encouraging way. They both thrived, but the plant talked to grew a little grew taller and a little bushier than it’s roommate. In the third room, the plants were watered and fertilized automatically, but each day one of the plants was verbally abused. Both were equally barren and stunted.

After spending years in sales management and more years watching sales management, I can say without fear of contradiction that the effects of most sales manager “motivational” conversations have the same effects on salespeople and they did on plants.

The third level of bad is the negative impact on the bottom line. For customers, the memory of their experience that day will last for years. This event caused a very visceral reaction that is now going to be incorporated into the subconscious memory of all the shoppers who witnessed it. They now have a negative feeling associated with this store anchored at the subconcious level. In the future, when given a choice to shop at this store again or another store, subconsciously they will go to the other store first.

The store will lose those customers for life. Unless this store creates a reason so compelling for them to come back it negates their subconscious feelings. That reason is usually a “very big discount” sale. And that is what is happening more and more. In this store, on this weekend, they are having 70% off sale.

After what happened yesterday I make the following prediction: The sale will be extended!

When I see retailers posting lower than expected earnings and blaming the housing market, I see a bunch of people in denial. Customers haven’t stopped buying; they just stopped buying from them. So as we enter the season of good cheer, I offer this word of advice to the Scrooges of sales management: Be nice to your salespeople!

My first sales manager mentor was a man all the salespeople would fight tigers for. He taught me well and as I moved up the food chain, I had the kind of sales management success he had by following his five simple rules.

1. Love your salespeople. Make them feel they are the most important people in the company because they are. They are the people who generate the revenue that feeds everyone else.

2. Commend in public. Reprimand in private. Seeing you come out onto the sales floor should be a good thing; not the feelings of dread felt by a cell of prisoners watching the executioner coming for his next victim.

3. Be a trainer, not a dictator. Salespeople are like thoroughbred racehorses; the are nervous, skittish, high strung and temperamental. They rarely respond well to the whip. Do everything in your power to help your people improve their talent, skills, abilities, and life; and they will win races for you.

4. Don’t post sales performance records for all to see. Everyone must believe they are winners, posting performance divides the team into winners and losers.

5. Do everything in your power to make the sales floor a fun and exciting place to work. Happy salespeople cause customers want to shop and return often to a place that is fun and exciting.

The holidays are here (already) and the difference between a good season and a bad season is going to be the happiness levels of your salespeople.

"...Christmas is already here!"

Christmas is coming earlier and earlier every year. Here we are barely in October; not yet past Halloween, the elections or even Thanksgiving and I have already seen my first Christmas Display.

It was an aisle of Christmas decorations and lights. There were also shelves of “pre-wrapped” stocking stuffers with a visual display of the contents. There were boxes of cards and a rack of wrapping paper rolls and ribbons.

We haven’t even advanced into fall yet. It was 85 degrees outside, the sun was shining and I was in a tee shirt, shorts and flip-flops staring at an Inflatable Santa next to a Snowman inside an inflatable Snow Globe complete with blowing snow.

Probably the tackiest of all (at least to me) was the selection of “Pre-Paid Christmas themed gift cards” that take all thought and consideration out of the gift shopping process.

I think retailers have killed Christmas. It has lost it’s magic for me and many people I know. For a lot of people Christmas is now so commercial it has become a chore. The death of Christmas is even becoming a popular theme in Hollywood as shown in the movie "Christmas with the Cranks."

Christmas has become more about buying and less about giving if I were to believe the signs throughout the store encouraging me to shop early and avoid the rush. It reminds me of an old Stan Freeberg comedy routine called: “Green Chri$tma$.”

(http://freberg.8m.com/text/greenchristmas.html).

There was a time when the approaching colder weather was a sign the holidays were coming, but now the retailers are skipping right to the mother lode of shopping and moving the season up sooner and sooner as the chase the Holy Grail of more sales.

There was a time when Thanksgiving weekend was the “semi official” start of the Christmas shopping season. What ever happened to Thanksgiving and Halloween? I guess they aren’t profitable enough to be focused on by retailers.

On a technical note: I think that moving the shopping season up earlier and earlier each year is the reason why Christmas sales are so disappointing and getting more so each year for retailers.

Christmas shopping has gotten to be such an “Un-Special” experience, it doesn’t matter when you Christmas shop anymore. Over the last few years I have heard more and more people talking about doing the Christmas shopping for the following year during the January clearance sales.

It’s ironic in a way, by moving the shopping season up earlier, consumers have taken it to an extreme and are using the retailer’s Christmas overstock situation as a bargain shopping opportunity... for next Christmas.

There is going to be a death spiral aspect to the Christmas shopping season next year only a retail consultant or bargain shopper can love. To make up for the lack of sales this year, retailers are going to make the Christmas shopping season even more "unspecial" next year by moving the season to August.

The longer and earlier shopping season will cause even more merchandise to be sold at deeper discounts the following January as holiday sales again fail to meet expectations. This will end up causing retailers to attempt a recovery the following year by kicking off the Christmas shopping season on 4th of July weekend.

This does not say good things about the country, the economy or even us as a people. I fully expect to wake up on Christmas Day and see ads in the newspapers and on television claiming there are only “365 more shopping days until Christmas!”

Singing Pigs and Mimes

I believe in making the shopping process more experiential, more educational, and more entertaining. There are a lot of companies that do a great job making the shopping process fun and entertaining. Costco this past Sunday was not one of them. There’s an old saying that goes: “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It’s a waste of your time and only irritates the pig.”

What about the people who must endure the singing pigs? I ask this question because I was shopping at a Costco last Sunday one of the vendors was having live demonstrations of his product…Your Home Karaoke System.

I am a big fan of product demonstrations, but this one was missing an essential component – someone who could sing. Some of the worst experiences in life involve bad singers; Happy Birthday songs at the local restaurant, outtakes from American Idol, and Karaoke. At least with the Happy Birthday songs, they are over in less than a minute. With American Idol you can hit the “Mute” button. For some reason Karaoke singers believe volume overcomes lack of talent and that is where the problem begins.

You have to look at the roots of Karaoke to really understand the phenomenon. It began in Japan during the late 1980’s as a way for emotionally repressed “company men” who were culturally obligated to spend their evenings after hours bonding with their bosses while drinking copious amounts of alcohol, to vent their feelings of frustration.

Having attended a few of those sessions, it always appeared to me the singers were bad on purpose as a way of torturing their superiors in a socially acceptable way for forcing them to go drinking instead of going home after work. I have never heard of a music star in Japan who got their start at the local Karaoke bar.

There are companies out there who do a great job at making the shopping process more experiential, more educational, and more entertaining. The first one that comes to mind for me was Harry’s Farmers Market in Atlanta Georgia. When I first moved to Atlanta, Just about everyone I met, upon learning I was new to the area asked me if I’d been to Harry’s Farmers Market yet, and went on to tell me wonderful stories about their shopping experiences. I went and learned how much fun grocery shopping can be. The experience defies documentation in a format such as this.

Then there was a music store that sold records, instruments and sheet music in Honolulu called Da Music Place (long since closed and evicted to make way for yet another high rise condo) that featured local musicians playing on a small stage in the store three days a week from 6pm to closing. On weekends the instructors would offer free lessons on guitar and ukulele. It was a fun way to spend a few hours learning about music while shopping for music.

One of my favorites was a bar and grill on the beach on north coast of Brazil. When you ordered food at the bar, the waiter would bring it out on a plate raw and lead you outside to this huge donut shaped grill out on the beach that had a couple of chefs in the middle. A chef would quiz you about your knowledge of cooking, of spices and your tastes and make recommendations. Then they would coach you through the process of cooking your dinner.

It was there I learned a style of spicing and grilling fish that has caused me to receive high praise for my cooking skill from family and friends for twenty years.

Barnes and Nobles and Borders bookstores have learned that making the shopping process more experiential, more educational, and more entertaining is a good way to protect their business against Internet predators such as Amazon.com.

There is enough aggravation in our daily existence that we don’t need more of it while shopping. They only thing I can say good about shopping at Costco last Sunday was they didn’t have mimes manning the tasting booths.

Running with Scissors

The way many retailers are embracing technology today reminds me of kids playing with their new toys. My first evidence is the fact that air travel today is using technology to replace people to the point it is beginning to resemble some form of Universal Torture with all the players competing for the title “Most Unfriendly Way to Fly.”

I recently had to travel to Miami and tried to book a ticket over the phone. I encountered the increasingly more popular ROBOATTENDENT. A computer with a voice recognition system that is doomed to send more people into a depression than the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Computer: “And where would you like to fly to?”

Me: “Miami”

Computer: “I didn’t understand what you said, could you please repeat where you would like to fly to?”

Me: “Miami”

Computer: “I didn’t understand what you said, could you please spell it? Please say first letter.”

Me: “M”

Computer: “I didn’t understand what you said, could you please repeat first letter?”

Me: In a desperate attempt to escape from the roboattendent: “CUSTOMER SERVICE!”

Computer: “I didn’t understand what you said, could you please spell it? Please say first letter.”

It is not just happening with airlines, it is happening every where as all companies look for ways to use technology to replace people. Somehow it seems to me that the more businesses try to improve their ability to take our money from us the worse it gets for us. The roboattendent is just the tip of the iceberg.

Along with roboattendents come the new breed of money extracting technology “robocashiers.” These automated cashiers now are frustrating customers in supermarkets and hardware stores, but it is only a matter of time before they take over the entire retail sector and renders it “humanless” fulfilling the prophecies of “The Terminator” movie series.

As companies accelerate the pace at which they replace employees with machines, any savings in labor costs are offset by declining sales. All the business pundits blame the drop in retail sales the past couple of quarters on the drop in home sales and I think they are wrong.

It seems to me to be obvious why sales have fallen, or are stagnant for many retailers including Wal-Mart; you’ve fired all the people. It reminds me of an old protest poster from the sixties: “What if the had a war and nobody came?”

Since I make my living working with retailers, I wanted to see if this trend was going to be as big a threat to my income as it is to the cashier’s income. Over the weekend I went to a number of retailers to see for myself what impact the robocashiers were having on productivity. To start with, I went to Home Depot and as I walked in, I saw that there were long lines formed behind the human cashiers and all the lines at the robocashiers are empty.

Now this is where the robocashiers are costing them money. Once the lines at the cash registers get long, some of the customers heading to the checkouts took a look at the long lines and abandoned their full shopping arts in the aisles and left.

In the meantime the only people using the robocashiers at Home Depot are people with only a couple of items. So they spend God knows how much money on the technology, programming and training only help some rapidly purchase a gallon of flat white latex primer.

What makes this really funny is that Home Depot has a person stationed at the robocashiers to help customers use them. Why don’t they just open another register and put the “attendant” on it?

Watching the toys at work is one thing. Playing with them is another. So I took the plunge. After an hour of watching the trials and tribulations of the “early adopters” braving the robocashiers, I walked the aisles and picked up the necessary ingredients to build and Iguana cage with my son. The hinges scanned, and the box of screws scanned, but when I tried to scan a set of drill bits, the robocashier had a tantrum. It kept saying “please scan your next item” over and over again. I tried the vertical scanner; I tried the horizontal scanner to no avail. I was going to call the assistant, but she was busy trying to scan a shovel for another customer with the results I was getting.

So I lost hope and I left the items on the robocashier and went to True Value Hardware. They had no robocashiers, short lines moving fast, and all my business.

I next went into Albertson’s to see what effect the robos were having on productivity there and saw the same thing happening that happened at home depot; long lines behind the human cashiers, empty robo lines and a dedicated robo assistant standing there doing nothing but talking to the girl at the customer service desk.

Like anything new, it is going to take time until human customers are going to accept the inevitability of robocashiers, but in the meantime the learning curve is going to be brutal on the businesses that are the early adopters of the technology. I read a report in a magazine where supermarkets using robocashiers are reporting a 35% drop in impulse purchases.

What do they expect? They remove the cashiers in the name of cost cutting, and replace them with very expensive machines that work 24/7 and take no breaks, and don’t talk with customers causing a line to form, forcing those waiting in line to look at magazines and candy bars until they can’t resist the urge anymore.

I think the machines are having a worse effect on the businesses that invest in them that no one wants to talk about because of the amount of money spent. They are afraid that if they tell their bosses what is really happening in the stores, they will be replaced by roboexecutives. And since they won’t tell you what is really happening with the robocashiers on the store floors, I will.

The robocashiers are causing the businesses that install them to lose sales…for now. They are causing businesses to lose money because they humans are much slower to adapt to new technology than businesses are. It is a vicious cycle: companies make massive investments in techology to reduce operating expenses (number of employees) and the payback fails to meet projections. So the business has to cut expenses (number of humans) again so they invest in more technology causing the proliferation of robots to get worse.

I called my credit card company because there was an unfamiliar charge. But there was something different this time, when I pressed "O" instead of getting customer service I got “That is not a valid option. Please try again.”

My satellite service provider has taken over my credit card company (see An Eternity in Hell). The credit card company has become part of “Sky Net” the creator of the Terminators. They have terminated the human employees and replaced them with roboemployees. No matter what button I push I can’t reach a human, so I am cancelling my credit card. If they don’t want to give any work to humans, I don’t want to give them my money any more.

As businesses eliminate humans from the workplace in the pursuit of lower operating expense, how much longer before they eliminate humans altogether and just have the robots do business with each other? Think this question is far fetched look at the world of securities and how “electronic trading” has eliminated the most of the human element.

When the last employee is laid off, who is going to be left to buy?

I think the people who make investments in technology to save money need to inflect it on themselves first, before they inflict it on the public. If they don’t; they are in effect like kids running with scissors. Except the only thing they end up cutting is their bottom line.