The staff

We mention another aspect of in-person shopping.

Our photographer reminds us of another aspect of going shopping in person: the store staff.  Once universally called salespeople, now sales associates or other names designed to give them a sense of status without the substance, we’ll just call them the staff.

Their basic function is to make the formal sales transaction by receiving your money (or other method of payment) and transferring title to the goods purchased (as a lawyer or economist might say).  In almost all cases, however, in the past they also had a fund of knowledge about the store and its contents.  This could range from the immediate (“It’s over on aisle 5”) to the near-term (“We’re out but expect more next Thursday”) to the industry-wide (“Minolta isn’t making them anymore, but you might find a used one at Johnson’s over on 35th”).  They were expected to have a useful background in the goods (“You need this battery with that model”) which might extend to some insight into the customer (“I don’t think that one is really what you’re after; try this model, and see what you think”).

Alas, such standards are not universal nowadays.  At the fast-food and supermarket level you might not interact with anyone at all, just scan things or use a touch-screen kiosk.  You can even order ahead and reduce in-person shopping to the bare minimum of showing up in the parking lot.  At a slightly higher level, the staff in at least one phone-company store have only the function of telling you the current terms and promotions (which they look up on a tablet) and handing you a device.  If it’s present.  Problems with your account are referred to a call center elsewhere.  Indeed, if you have a slightly unusual question on your purchase the store staff might have to call their own call center.  And AI will replace, or has already replaced, much of this.

The excuse is, of course, that people are expensive.  An automatic kiosk is much cheaper to run than a person.  Reducing head-count directly reduces costs.  And training is even more expensive.  Not only must you have hired someone, you must take time (paid time) to get across information; and while your staff members are doing this, they’re not selling any goods.

In principle, this minimization of staff should result in lower prices all around and thus happier customers.  Certainly it’s easy to show by the financial accounts.  And if your goal as a shopper is a quart of milk and a box of breakfast cereal (both coming from far away anyway), having actual people in the store is not really necessary.

However, our photographer presents someone from his recent shopping trip at the other end of the scale.  He met what we’ll call an Expert staffmember.  This person was thoroughly familiar with the gear in his shop, as well as everything the company had made and sold for a long time before.  He was ready to share experiences and suggest possibilities even if they didn’t directly pertain to goods now present.  He demonstrated several models that our photographer certainly wasn’t about to buy, as far as we can see just out of pleasure in how well they were designed and built.

The Expert Staff is expensive.  Indeed, at the highest level of skill they can’t be bought or built, only snapped up if they come on the market.  And they may not result in a directly measurable increase in sales.  Indirectly, though, we think they have a great effect.  At least, our photographer is musing upon possible purchases that he would never have considered before.