Thought of the Day - How To Piss Off Your Customers

What are the three easiest ways for supermarkets to piss off their customers?


1. Provide plastic bags that tear at the least provocation.
There are two CTQ's for a plastic bag; 1) It is intact and 2) It has handles. Nothing is more annoying when you pack a bag, pick it up, it tears and all your bruisable items fall on the hard tarmac. Sometimes it is because some foolish cashier has used a knife to open a new pack of bags and put a slice in them all. Sometimes the bags are just poorly formed and weak. Either way it is seriously annoying.

If the things the customer just paid for end up ruined because you supplied crappy bags they won't be returning.


2. Put products where customers don't expect them to be.
Where would you expect to find socks? Perhaps menswear, perhaps next to the underwear, heck at least in the clothing section. If you guessed no to all of the above, correct! In fact socks are located in the toiletries section, somewhere between condoms and moisturiser. Who on gods green earth thought that was a sensible choice, what do socks have to do with toiletries?

If the customer can't find what they are looking for you aren't going to sell it.


3. Have barely any stock on the shelves for most of the day.
The reason that Taiichi Ohno (the father of Lean manufacturing), was so impressed with western supermarkets was that while there was limited stock on the shelves, they were replenished as the product was sold in a pull system. I suspect he would be less impressed with the Frome Sainsburys. Whenever i go in there are chronic shortages of a lot of the products, especially in the fruit and veg section. I mean how hard would it be to have an electronic signal to the warehouse to replenish every time half of the shelf inventory was sold? That would mean constant replenishment, constant supply and lots of small shelf-stacking exercises rather than the mammoth ones they have at the moment. The whole point of the shelving is that customers can get what they want, if they can't then what on earth is the point of putting product out at all.

If there is nothing for the customer to buy you definitely won't sell it.


Running a supermarket should be a relatively simple exercise but yet they manage to screw it up. I do find it somewhat ironic that supermarkets inspired some of the principles in one of the great process methodologies but somehow in the intervening period they have lost all of the best parts.