Usually, when people are straight out of college and looking for work, they choose customer service or retail jobs since it’s a great way to get some experience. Needless to say, being a retail associate definitely has its perks: company discounts, flexible hours, and a variety of different jobs available. Plus, often there’s no need to have some special qualifications and you get to meet all kinds of people along the way.
However, it’s definitely not an easy job. It’s truly demanding, both physically and mentally, and requires a lot of patience and knowledge of how to react in conflict situations. From straight-up unreasonable to plain difficult, retail workers meet some of the most nightmarish customers there are, and the pay does not reflect the amount of energy they put into their jobs.
So having a place to turn to, like the Retail Problems account, can be a great relief. Letting out a few laughs with your co-workers can help you deal with the stress and anxiety that you might feel at work. Whether it’s trying to tell a story in between serving customers or coming back from the stock room and not remembering what the customer looks like, this account is full of share-worthy memes.
But even though the job is demanding and it might seem that there's no way for it to get better any time soon, there are a few things retailers can try. One of the problems is that the employees feel like they have no say in the decisions happening at their workplace.
Most often it’s their shifts that cause the biggest discomfort. Unstable scheduling thrives across the retail industry in order to get better profits, when in fact, such practices have hidden costs, researchers stated in Harvard Business Review.
The online shopping business has grown immensely over the past few years and retail stores needed to find new ways to compete. Since traditional methods like convenience, assortment, and pricing were not enough, the one thing they can really offer is service: "Yet, research suggests that retailers tend to view store associates as an expense to be controlled rather than as a medium to provide better service for customers."
It turns out, customer service is the main thing that separates them from the online giants that steal their customers every day. Researchers did an experiment at Gap where they put retail associates on more stable schedules and studied the business results. When they began working with the American clothing retailer, most employees worked part-time and received their schedules often only three days before the beginning of the new week.
During the experiment, 28 stores were randomly assigned to control and intervention groups, and the latter ones had to try out a few changes: giving workers a stable schedule, standard start and end times for shifts, and eliminating "on-calls".
The results were incredible: sales increased by 7% and labor productivity by 5%. These are some impressive numbers for an industry that works really hard to increase sales by 1-2% and where "productivity grew by only 2.5% per year between 1987 and 2014." So shifting to a more stable schedule is a win-win for both the employers and their employees.
Moreover, it seems that the pandemic has made such an impact on consumer behavior that makes it difficult for things to go back to "normal". Data shows that customers "are likely to keep the behaviors they’ve adopted amid stay-at-home orders, such as more online shopping and fewer mall visits", so in order to survive, retailers need to put more focus on their employees and take their customer experience to a whole new level.
We all know that having a chuckle improves our mood, makes us more productive and generally happier. While there are still plenty of problems within this slowly declining industry, retail workers find different ways to laugh about the pains and struggles they face in their day-to-day jobs. So thanks to Retail Problems, the atmosphere for associates at work can become a little lighter, and stress levels a bit lower.
