Good news for those of us that are a little bit old fashioned, a grocery store chain in Massachusetts and Connecticut,
Big Y, is doing away with those annoying self check out lines. In direct response to customer feedback, the company has decided to swap out the experimental checkout counters in all of it's stores, and replace them with actual humans. The company conducted a study thinking it would confirm it's intuition that the self checkout system would speed the process up, but in fact it had the exact opposite effect. Customers apparently prefer to have a human help them, as opposed to an automated system, and how can you blame them? Who here wants to have to look for a bar code for a chili pepper, or have a system tell you to place your item in a bag...when it's already there? It can be incredibly frustrating and time consuming. The system on paper is great, but the execution is still not there. With 61 stores in the two states, the transition back to cashiers and baggers should not be that hard, versus a much larger national chain such as Kroger.
This idea of switching back to older techniques is incredibly interesting. Most of the time, companies switch to more automated systems to increase efficiency, and save money by not having to pay an employee to do the actual job. On paper, it's a great idea from a company standpoint. Most often you'll see changes like this in larger corporations, but it's great to see a smaller company like
Big Y recognize that a lot of times, customers want to have human interaction. While it might not help the bottom line of the company, from a customer service stand point, it's the right thing to do as it keeps people happy. Sometimes what is thought up in the management concept meetings, doesn't translate directly to the company's bottom line. It will be interesting to see if other companies that use the autmomated system will go back to the older systems that required more employees, or if we will see some kind of hybrid approach between the two extremes. Either way, we can't help smiling and nodding as we read about other people that really want to have a human interaction, as opposed to what the corporate highers ups actually think they know what we want.
For more on the study and the changes at
Big Y,
click here.
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Posted by GetHuman on Tue, 27 Sep 2011 7:18pm