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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Does anyone remember service merchandise? I guess it existed in some form till the early 2000s but does anyone remember it in the old days? Aren't you describing Ikea?
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Dec 10, 2016 18:09
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Does anyone remember service merchandise? I guess it existed in some form till the early 2000s but does anyone remember it in the old days? That's an ikea.
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Dec 10, 2016 18:24
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OwlFancier posted:That's an ikea. How much is an Ikea a big box retailers? It certainly fits the description in some ways (big location, homogenous lay out, exhaustive selection of products), but not in others (they are selective in where they build locations, and aren't focused on being super cheap)
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Dec 10, 2016 18:33
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Liquid Communism posted:Walmart would absolutely be forced to pay more without the government subsidies because their workforce would literally die off otherwise. This isn't the government selling 'excess labor' because the government flatly does not own these people's labor in the first place. This is entirely a large, multi-national corporation knowingly choosing to pay its staff less than a living wage in order to improve its own bottom line while the state picks up the tab for keeping the workers from starving. Well no, what they'd probably be "forced" to do is to cut their lowest profit stores, and barely touch wages in other areas. What does some random Walton billionaire care about any particular store's workers dying? silence_kit posted:Aren't you describing Ikea? OwlFancier posted:That's an ikea. No, in an Ikea you go grab the stuff yourself. A Service Merchandise had all the Ikea displays of stuff, but if you wanted that bed/chair/whatever you saw, you had either the staff go get it in the back-warehouse, or most of the time had to wait for it to be delivered to the store from a distribution center.
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Dec 10, 2016 18:34
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The showroom is every big box store, and the warehouse is amazon.
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Dec 10, 2016 18:49
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fishmech posted:No, in an Ikea you go grab the stuff yourself. A Service Merchandise had all the Ikea displays of stuff, but if you wanted that bed/chair/whatever you saw, you had either the staff go get it in the back-warehouse, or most of the time had to wait for it to be delivered to the store from a distribution center.
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Dec 10, 2016 18:55
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The Service Merchandise model is a bit challenging because on one hand a showroom is very space-inefficient in terms of inventory distribution, but some of that inefficiency can be offset by having a dense warehouse. Thing is, we already have low-labor places like Costco and ALDI that stock their sales floor by dropping a pallet on it and breaking the shrink wrap. They're considered niche because even Wal-Mart has drastically better merchandising. So, that factor definitely needs to be considered. At the same time, merchandising is a big labor sink because these stores are full of irregularly-sized irregularly-distributed product that has to be constantly reset due to customers ruffling it. The cashier position is really the most-threatened position right now. Wal-Mart has been trying to push for RFID for a long time to get rid of cashiers and heavily reduce inventory costs, but haven't had much luck for various reasons. Amazon Go is really just another way of doing the same thing and honestly could have been done a long time ago with RFID.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:06
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fishmech posted:No, in an Ikea you go grab the stuff yourself. A Service Merchandise had all the Ikea displays of stuff, but if you wanted that bed/chair/whatever you saw, you had either the staff go get it in the back-warehouse, or most of the time had to wait for it to be delivered to the store from a distribution center. Then some kind of blend of an Ikea and an Argos. Argos functions like that but it generally has a catalogue rather than a showroom.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:09
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Does anyone remember service merchandise? I guess it existed in some form till the early 2000s but does anyone remember it in the old days? Yeah, this was probably the closest big box store that we had near my house, the other being kmart roughly the same distance in the other direction. Service Merchandise was kind of an outlier though because they had a poo poo ton of stuff, kmart might have 2-3 shelf stereo systems but if I am remember right Service Merch had probably 10 on display and who knows how many more in the catalog. It was basically the ikea model, but with more 'sears catalog' thrown in. It was a pretty interesting place to shop. They sold everything from housewares to jewlery and clothes to guns and the catalog was massive. It reminded me more of a sears then walmart though, except that you couldn't just grab your box of whatever, you had to find someone to get it for you. OwlFancier posted:Then some kind of blend of an Ikea and an Argos. Argos functions like that but it generally has a catalogue rather than a showroom. The catalog was a huge part of it.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:12
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Does anyone remember service merchandise? I guess it existed in some form till the early 2000s but does anyone remember it in the old days? That only really did any good for large appliances people don't buy very often. That model works great for refrigerators and ovens but not much else. Sears still does that; there's one like a mile from where I live. Granted it's obviously a pillaged husk of what it used to be; the building is in poor condition, there are zero shelves or platforms to put the merchandise on, and the fixtures look like they've been there since the 60's. There's also a single row of overpriced "wholesale" clothes that was out of fashion a decade ago.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:15
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Maybe it depends on the Ikea, because you definitely have to go to the back-warehouse to get the bigger stuff where I'm from, with only the smaller high volume stuff (and things which can fit in relatively small flatpack) being something you get yourself. Eh you're not getting it. At a Service Merchandise, the workers go got everything for you. The warehouse area was offlimits, and for a lot of the items it was even an actual warehouse at another location. So you might order a thing, wait a few days, and come back to pick it up At an Ikea, you go get everything yourself from the warehouse, which you're allowed to go in. Occasionally for really big stuff an employee will help, of course.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:39
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Guys you realize pretty much every furniture store ever works on this model right? It's not some sort of unique business model. The thing Ikea did that was different is instead of the warehouse and/or assembly part being completely abstracted from the process because it's handled behind the scenes you go into the warehouse and pick up your own poo poo and assemble it at home instead of it getting delivered a few days later. Jarmak fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Dec 10, 2016 |
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Dec 10, 2016 19:44
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Service merchandise sounds like an attempt to transfer the U.K. shop "Argos" to the USA. But I think time has moved past that model. It's a bit like Amazon but you have to actually go there. You fill out a form, wait 20 minutes until your ticket number comes up, and then your goods magically appear from the bowels of their warehouse out back. It was big in the U.K. because there wasn't anywhere else you could go to get things like Barbie's dream house or a fridge until supermarkets started expanding into that.
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Dec 10, 2016 19:44
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Jarmak posted:Guys you realize pretty much every furniture store ever works on this model right? It's not some sort of unique business model. That and they make easily assembled, really cheap modular furniture that's of a quality best described as "good enough."
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Dec 10, 2016 19:46
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fishmech posted:Eh you're not getting it.
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Dec 10, 2016 20:00
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Maybe I'm not being clear, but what I'm saying is, my local Ikea has both. Some poo poo you can get yourself in the warehouse between the showroom and the checkout, while other stuff you have to go down the road to another warehouse where a worker will find your stuff for you. IKEA has smaller stuff on the shelves, larger stuff in the warehouse/on order. If Service Merchandise was like Argos, there's nothing on the shelves but a few example items. Even a teddy bear or a set of knives comes up from the warehouse.
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Dec 10, 2016 20:03
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The provincial liquor stores in Alberta used to work like that before the liquor retail was privatized, I'm told. Honestly, I wouldn't mind going back to a system like that. In general, I already have a pretty good idea what I want when I go in, and it's not a product that benefits in any way from being handled or seen, so wandering through a poorly-organized store looking for the thing I want is just an awful waste of time.
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Dec 10, 2016 20:17
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PT6A posted:The provincial liquor stores in Alberta used to work like that before the liquor retail was privatized, I'm told. But if they organize the store badly and make you search for things you might find something else to buy. Incidentally this is why I prefer to buy stuff online as much as I can; none of that bullshit. None of the stupid psychological tricks that malls and stores use to manipulate you. Just "dear Amazon: I want these things, send them to this address kthxbai" then wait a few days for a box.
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Dec 10, 2016 20:46
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ToxicSlurpee posted:But if they organize the store badly and make you search for things you might find something else to buy. And yet Amazon still does that, in a sense, by showing you items that were frequently bought with, or by the same people as, the item you're already planning on buying. And they e-mail me all the time suggesting things I might also like to buy (and indeed I do buy them sometimes). I don't object to stores wanting to sell me extra things, I object to them doing that by actively designing the shopping experience to be as long and frustrating as possible. My guess is that Amazon's product suggestions have a much higher take rate than just forcing people to wander by things they might want in a vain search to locate the thing they actually want. For example, my supermarket decided that, on the over-aisle signs, they would simply not list cooking oil, a basic staple everyone needs to locate and buy regularly, so you have to wander up and down the aisles looking for it. Likewise, canned vegetables can be in any one of five different locations. Normal canned vegetables are in one place, canned tomato products are somewhere else, and you might find the canned beans you're looking for in any one of three other different locations (and also in the normal canned veggies section) depending on whether they suspect you might be cooking Caribbean cuisine, Indian cuisine, or Mexican cuisine. The dried beans may also be located according to a similar yet distinct logic, but god knows you wouldn't want to put them right next to the canned beans in any of the above cases! God I loving hate shopping for groceries... EDIT: And then, even when it's -25 with wind chill outside, they keep the store at a toasty 23 degree, so if you're wearing suitable clothing to actually reach the store without freezing, you have roughly a 70% chance of showing up to the checkout drenched in sweat and/or dying of heatstroke once you've finished wandering all around hell's half acre looking for the things on your shopping list. And you get the knowledge that you're paying extra so they can keep the store so warm, and at the very same time, keep their chilled items cold. Wonderful! PT6A fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Dec 10, 2016 |
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Dec 10, 2016 21:24
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PT6A posted:And yet Amazon still does that, in a sense, by showing you items that were frequently bought with, or by the same people as, the item you're already planning on buying. And they e-mail me all the time suggesting things I might also like to buy (and indeed I do buy them sometimes). I don't object to stores wanting to sell me extra things, I object to them doing that by actively designing the shopping experience to be as long and frustrating as possible. My guess is that Amazon's product suggestions have a much higher take rate than just forcing people to wander by things they might want in a vain search to locate the thing they actually want. Kind of my point, really; like I also don't complain when Steam makes me recommendations for games I might like to play. Instead of forcing me to look at a pile of stupid bullshit I don't want it looks at the games I own and says "hey here's a similar one you might like." Then I can either buy it or not. Amazon's recommendations aren't much different. Another nice difference is that Amazon has that search bar. A brick and mortar store does not. If all I want is one specific thing I can just type it in and Amazon will be like "yup, right here, nine people are selling that thing, have some prices." There will be that line of "people who bought that also bought these" but I can just ignore it. I don't need to scour the site and go out of my way to find what I want. Brick and mortar stores are also generally run on skeleton crews these days. Finding somebody to ask about where something is can take an unreasonable amount of time. A search bar on a website knows where everything is.
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Dec 10, 2016 21:31
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Amazon is good if you know what you want but if you're just looking for a class of product it can be a nightmare. There is such a thing as too much choice.
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Dec 10, 2016 21:33
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Brick and mortar stores are also generally run on skeleton crews these days. Finding somebody to ask about where something is can take an unreasonable amount of time. A search bar on a website knows where everything is. Ah, the first hurdle to clear is "does the employee even have the faintest loving idea what you're talking about?" which you really only have about a 30% chance of passing. Then it has to be something which they carry and is in stock... that's maybe a 40% chance if you haven't already been able to find it yourself, and then the employee has to know where it is... let's say another 30% chance. So, yeah, the odds are not good.
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Dec 10, 2016 21:34
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Walmart actively avoids paying anybody at all. I worked for them a few years ago and when the recession hit they did their best to cut hours to the bone and get rid of anybody making more than ten an hour. Benefits also instantaneously became prohibitively expensive. Now they absolutely will not start new people full time. This is entirely geared toward making the Walton kids rich. They won't raise wages like that unless they're forced to. I've heard that Wal-Mart started bumping wages up again a year or two - as it turned out, cutting labor to the bone resulted in a seriously degraded experience at stores, which was hurting their sales. We're talking "shelves bare because the store is running on a skeleton crew and the one person stocking the shelves is doing three other things and also dragging their feet because they're tired from their second job" type poo poo.
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Dec 10, 2016 21:45
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It is kinda odd that I have basically two options - either I go to a warehouse and manually pick out stuff or full service with delivery. Why can't I order my groceries online and then go pick up a box? I mean walking around looking for canned goods, toilet paper, tooth paste etc. is not really a good use of my time but with delivery there is a scheduling issue - at least until I have a drop box for groceries which most people don't have yet. It's just weird it became this either or setup.
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Dec 10, 2016 22:37
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Main Paineframe posted:I've heard that Wal-Mart started bumping wages up again a year or two - as it turned out, cutting labor to the bone resulted in a seriously degraded experience at stores, which was hurting their sales. We're talking "shelves bare because the store is running on a skeleton crew and the one person stocking the shelves is doing three other things and also dragging their feet because they're tired from their second job" type poo poo. I worked at a Walmart for four years and was there right around when the Great Recession hit. Yes that's basically the problem but only part of it. When I started the department I worked for was a department manager, two full time employees (I was one of them), a part time employee, and three or four people overnight. Even that wasn't quite enough so there was pretty much always an offer of overtime on the table. If I wanted or needed some extra cash I could seriously just go say "yo boss, can I have extra time?" and they'd find me poo poo to do. Benefits at the time weren't prohibitively expensive and actually decent. Yeah the pay wasn't great and retail work always sucks but it wasn't awful. Then 2008 happened. Hours were cut to the bone; anybody that made more than $10 an hour was either fired or abused into leaving. A few dozen department manager positions were condensed into like five. The department I worked for was cut to the department manager, who was heaped with other departments, me who worked 35 hours a week and absolutely no more, and two part timers overnight. There would be multiple day stretches where literally nobody was in the department. Yet management was demanding things be kept up to the same standards as before. People were constantly getting written up for not being able to do the impossible things. When I left I was a part time person that was expected to do the work of like 20 full time people. Probably more, really. The other side of it was that the people working there were absolutely demoralized. They were overworked, their pay declined every year, benefits got obscenely expensive, and they constantly got negativity from management. You'd constantly hear complaints about customers whining that nobody answers their questions, the shelves are all bare, and the store was filthy. Instead of hiring more people they just cracked the whip harder. Thankfully I was in college at the time so I could just go "don't need this loving job" and left. It just wasn't worth it anymore; I would literally have lost money by keeping my job thanks to the commuting costs and how much insurance ended up being. Insurance was the only reason I stayed. And like you said it hurt their bottom line but instead of doing the obvious thing and increasing the budget for employees and employee pay they just yelled more. I actively avoid shopping at Walmart because every single thing they've done to supposedly increase pay or treat employees better hasn't done that. They don't give you a starting wage bump for previous experience and start people as part time, $9 an hour. If you're lucky and work hard enough you might get full time after a few years. Now they're dealing with the same issues they had before. Upper management absolutely will not budge on headcounts; there are never enough people to run the store properly. The employees they do get hate their jobs, turnover is huge, and everybody has an attitude of "you don't pay me enough to care." They're making a big deal out of something they aren't actually doing. They absolutely do not want to pay decent wages. What they want is two things that are mutually exclusive. You can't run a store well on a skeleton crew paid starvation wages and also have employees that are happy to be there who take good care of customers. It's killing Walmart. Good loving riddance. The real interesting thing is that one reason Walmart was so successful was because Mr. Sam made it a point to motivate his employees by actually taking decent care of them. Some of the older people I worked with were making like $16 an hour with good benefits to do stuff on the level of cleaning the bathrooms. They obviously weren't getting wealthy off of their jobs but made enough to live comfortably. They were actually quite motivated and made it a point to do good work. There were a lot of programs put in place before the Walton children took over that new employees weren't allowed to have. You know, stuff like Christmas bonuses, short term disability, that sort of thing. The bennies have just been declining for the entire time the Walton children have been owning the company. You can really see this in the stuff that Mr. Sam said. "There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." "The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers." Now Walmart's management is being tremendously lovely to their employees, who aren't being good to the customers. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Dec 11, 2016 |
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Dec 10, 2016 22:42
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:The showroom is every big box store, and the warehouse is amazon. Imagine an ikea layout hybridized with an amazon fulfillment center
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Dec 10, 2016 23:19
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Bates posted:Why can't I order my groceries online and then go pick up a box? That's a thing now safeway's are doing it.
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Dec 10, 2016 23:23
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Bates posted:It is kinda odd that I have basically two options - either I go to a warehouse and manually pick out stuff or full service with delivery. Why can't I order my groceries online and then go pick up a box? I mean walking around looking for canned goods, toilet paper, tooth paste etc. is not really a good use of my time but with delivery there is a scheduling issue - at least until I have a drop box for groceries which most people don't have yet. It's just weird it became this either or setup. Around here, Stop & Shop offers that, as do Ahold's other supermarket chains across the US - usually as a bunch of climate-controlled lockers out front of the store. They only offer it at some of the stores though, while the delivery service is offered from a lot more. The need to have a separate storage space seems to be the biggest issue for expanding it.
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Dec 11, 2016 00:14
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BarbarianElephant posted:Service merchandise sounds like an attempt to transfer the U.K. shop "Argos" to the USA. It's the exact same sort of store but service merchandise predates argos by like half a century.
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Dec 11, 2016 00:18
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Bates posted:It is kinda odd that I have basically two options - either I go to a warehouse and manually pick out stuff or full service with delivery. Why can't I order my groceries online and then go pick up a box? I mean walking around looking for canned goods, toilet paper, tooth paste etc. is not really a good use of my time but with delivery there is a scheduling issue - at least until I have a drop box for groceries which most people don't have yet. It's just weird it became this either or setup. I did this for the first time last week and will never set foot in a grocery store again unless I need like 1-2 very specific things or didn't plan ahead, it's so much better of a shopping experience. Put your order in online and pick it up in 3 hours or less, sign the credit card slip at the pickup window and you're off.
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Dec 11, 2016 00:50
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PT6A posted:Ah, the first hurdle to clear is "does the employee even have the faintest loving idea what you're talking about?" which you really only have about a 30% chance of passing. Then it has to be something which they carry and is in stock... that's maybe a 40% chance if you haven't already been able to find it yourself, and then the employee has to know where it is... let's say another 30% chance. There has been a real shift in employee expertise over the years. Like if you walk into a specialty mom and pop store odds are the guy at the counter not only knows something about the stuff they sell but cares about it enough to run a store dedicated to it and probably can give you any detail you ask for and strong opinions on each and every relative merit of every sort of thing. Then at like chain specialty stores there is a degree that they hire randos but if you walk into game stop at least one person there definitely should be working at gamestop or there is at least one guy at autozone that definitely wanted to work at autozone and even the non-enthusiast workers know a thing or two just by being around a topic all day every day. Walmart is different, with thousands of products across every category there is literally no reason for anyone to have any special insight on what snowblower you should buy or what tv is good or what book you should read or anything at all any more than any random person would.
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Dec 11, 2016 00:51
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:probably can give you any detail you ask for and strong opinions on each and every relative merit of every sort of thing. Clerks who know this stuff can dramatically increase a stores sales relative to what they otherwise should be btw. Most stores have metrics where they expect a given store to have X amount of sales based on the demographics and amount of competition in an area. Performance can be measured by comparing actual sales to the demographically predicted sales. This also allows for comparing performance of stores in different markets. Here's the thing front line retail employees who have this knowledge don't usually stay in retail. They usually don't get paid more than body off the street. Or worse some idiot canned them because the cost associated with the long time they have worked for the store is higher.
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Dec 11, 2016 05:31
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fishmech posted:Around here, Stop & Shop offers that, as do Ahold's other supermarket chains across the US - usually as a bunch of climate-controlled lockers out front of the store. They only offer it at some of the stores though, while the delivery service is offered from a lot more. The demand for this is pretty low, like a fraction of one percent of our total sales. People either want the food delivered right to their house or if they're going to drive to the store then they want to browse
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Dec 11, 2016 06:29
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BrandorKP posted:Clerks who know this stuff can dramatically increase a stores sales relative to what they otherwise should be btw. Most stores have metrics where they expect a given store to have X amount of sales based on the demographics and amount of competition in an area. Performance can be measured by comparing actual sales to the demographically predicted sales. This also allows for comparing performance of stores in different markets. Here's the thing front line retail employees who have this knowledge don't usually stay in retail. They usually don't get paid more than body off the street. Or worse some idiot canned them because the cost associated with the long time they have worked for the store is higher. The more product catagories a store sells the less possible it is for the employees to have meaningful knowlage about a meaningful number of them. Even if Walmart wanted employees that knew their products as experts it wouldn't be possible. Every day too many new tvs, shirts, toys, foods would be complete coming in to even learn the names of each, let alone details or testimonies.
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Dec 11, 2016 07:10
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Yeah I suppose grocery and liquor is a different beast.
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Dec 11, 2016 07:15
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The more product catagories a store sells the less possible it is for the employees to have meaningful knowlage about a meaningful number of them. Even if Walmart wanted employees that knew their products as experts it wouldn't be possible. Every day too many new tvs, shirts, toys, foods would be complete coming in to even learn the names of each, let alone details or testimonies. You can do that with individual departments and Walmart used to. Then again they also used to pay decent enough wages that they could get a *thing* nerd to stick in any given department. Then again that's another complaint that I've heard from people. "Nobody at Walmart knows anything about what they sell!" well yeah Walmart doesn't want to pay for that skill so they don't get it.
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Dec 11, 2016 07:35
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Plinkey posted:I did this for the first time last week and will never set foot in a grocery store again unless I need like 1-2 very specific things or didn't plan ahead, it's so much better of a shopping experience. Put your order in online and pick it up in 3 hours or less, sign the credit card slip at the pickup window and you're off. This works for prepared goods but I can't imagine letting a random clerk pick my meat and fresh vegetables for me.
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Dec 11, 2016 17:47
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Jarmak posted:This works for prepared goods but I can't imagine letting a random clerk pick my meat and fresh vegetables for me. Thanks to the ridiculous standardization of industrially farmed food, it works fine. If every single cucumber on the rack is identical, any one will do. Since the food tends to come from a warehouse rather than a store, it tends not to have been picked over or bruised.
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Dec 11, 2016 19:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:There has been a real shift in employee expertise over the years. Like if you walk into a specialty mom and pop store odds are the guy at the counter not only knows something about the stuff they sell but cares about it enough to run a store dedicated to it and probably can give you any detail you ask for and strong opinions on each and every relative merit of every sort of thing. Then at like chain specialty stores there is a degree that they hire randos but if you walk into game stop at least one person there definitely should be working at gamestop or there is at least one guy at autozone that definitely wanted to work at autozone and even the non-enthusiast workers know a thing or two just by being around a topic all day every day. The market Walmart caters to, is it cheaper than anywhere else. That's all they care about that's all they need to worry about. As a consumer if you don't want it at the lowest price you can go somewhere else. Walmart doesn't care about anything than more money for us. gently caress you. They do it by catering to slice of the American consumer that must have lowest price. gently caress everyone else. Unpack that and you end up with all sorts of social problems to solve.
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Dec 11, 2016 23:33
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What's stopping Amazon from building a little room on to the front of their warehouses where the public can pick up an online order or browse Amazon.com at a touchscreen kiosk?
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Dec 12, 2016 07:15
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