Skip to main content

Second Chance

I never warmed up to the self-checkout lane though use it the majority of the time. There is something to be said for being familiar with names and faces of people. Some cashiers can be chattier than others, they warm up over time even if things were transactional to begin. Shopping at a big box store where these lanes are typically found is usually a soulless experience. The only human touch could be experienced at the check-out lane which many retailers decided to do away with to save monies. 

Yet the success of retail relies on the human experience at the store, it may be the only way to differentiate from competitors who look and feel much the same and can price match as well. Those few minutes at the check out line can the only way brand can stand out. I always found it counter-intuitive that brands did not see than as an opportunity but as a lever to crank up operational efficiency. Thanks to rampant theft, the math of self-out no longer makes sense and many retailers are removing this option. One can only hope this time around they have the sense to treat the presence of a human cashier and their ability to interact with the customer as the unique brand building opportunity that it is. 

My favorite check-out experience is at Trader Joe's and love that they never plan to introduce self-checkout. They are on to a good thing and are wise not to fix what is not broken. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...