Footwear Insight

12 • Footwear Insight ~ September/October 2018 footwearinsight.com Staff Sergeants THE BIG COMPLAINT I HEAR FROM RETAILERS TODAY IS "WE CAN'T find good staffers." And I would concur. When I am in your stores I can't find them either. In big-box stores, the staffers are usually stocking shelves as if that is more important than waiting on customers. And in smaller stores, I find staffers are not on the schedule. Here is my saddest customer service story of the summer. I was in South Jersey with my daughter at a softball tournament. We were spending some quality bonding time between games and happened upon Pelican's Snoballs. For those of you not familiar with Snoballs, they are Southern delicacy, which I first discovered in New Orleans. Snoballs are made of shaved ice, condensed milk and syrup and are incredibly delicious. In New Jersey, they are as a rare as an honest politician, so my daughter and I were not going to let this opportunity pass to have a fabulous between-games treat. We did our best second line stroll to the window where a harried young woman took our order and money and set about to making the Snoballs. Problem was she was there all by herself. And the Snoballs orders were piling up. There were two tables of eight waiting for orders and a few solitary soles also hankering for their Snoballs. After waiting about 10 minutes I calculated that there were 20 Snoballs to be made before we got ours. At one point the young woman came to the window and apologized for the delay and explained that it was never this busy on Saturday and that staff would not increase for another two hours when Pelican's hit its "usual busy time." Of course I am a kind and patient person, especially when it comes to retail and restaurants, and I felt for this young woman who was clearly stressed. Actually I am not patient at all, but I really really wanted one of these rare Snoballs, so I committed to waiting, but other customers were not so kind. Two huffed off and one man who had ordered four snoballs demanded a refund, which further slowed the process down. Bottom line: From the time I ordered my two Snoballs to the time I got them, it took 45 minutes. In that time, I saw 10 Snoball orders melt away through cancellations and "walkouts." By my math that was 12 orders lost, totaling $60. So by "saving" about 10 bucks an hour by not being adequately staffed, the Pelican owner had a net loss of about $50 in sales (probably $40 in net profit as I imagine the margins are quite high). The sad thing is he probably never even noticed because he wasn't there. In fact, when he rang up the day's receipts, he probably thought, "Hey, I had a good day. I beat last year's number." Sadly, he, like many other retail owners, was not adequately prepared for success. He should have known the softball tourney was in town and staffed up. Instead, by trying to save a few bucks, he lost four or five times that amount and ticked off some customers in the process. Retailers often make this error. They don't anticipate the possibility of success, don't plan for it and rarely get it. I believe it was the great basketball coach John Wooden who said, "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail." Or as I told my daughter that day: "There's a Snoball's chance in hell we'll ever go back there." l Mark Sullivan is a founding partner of Formula4 Media. He has been covering the footwear industry since 1984. By Mark Sullivan THE FOOTWEAR EYE O P I N I O N

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