Grocery store f***s up new rules with unintended results (11 GIFs)

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It’s not unreasonable to make new rules if your business has a problem.

HOWEVER, if you’re making up a rule, you NEED to consider how that rule might be used/abused. Because if you don’t, you get a situation like this one in a grocery store where the cashiers were essentially forced to do a worse job.

2

I’m not sure if this compliance is “malicious”, but many, many moons ago I worked as a cashier at a large supermarket chain that fought a battle against shrinkage and it’s a good example of how staff following arbitrary rules can have unintended results.

For those of you who have ever worked as a cashier at a large store, you’ll be familiar with the term “shrinkage”. It’s the amount of inventory and profit lost to staff carelessness, theft, or wastage.

3

One day all cashiers were called in for a meeting with the store manager. Turned out shrinkage at our store was far and above what it was at other stores, so instead of investing in more training to make sure people were handling transactions effectively, corporate wanted us to institute several policies to rank and penalize cashiers for certain “actions” that had been identified as contributing to shrinkage.

4

The store set up a penalty system where cashiers would be ranked, named and shamed on a leader board, and given disciplinary actions or potentially fired.

From now on, cashiers would receive a negative point for every void over a daily limit of 10. This meant that if a customer came through your line, then realized they didn’t want some or all of their order and you had to void it all, you’d get a penalty for each voided item over your 10 allotted voids.

5

You also got a negative point for any “cold open” of your cash till – for example, if you forgot to give someone their cash back or someone wanted change without a transaction, you got a negative point for opening your till without a transaction.

Lastly, they told us cashiers were not allowed to have our tills open for longer than 10 seconds per transaction on average. Your till would set off this shrill alert once your 10 seconds was up and you got a point each time your alarm was triggered.

6

Well… you can imagine what happened next. I was working in the cash office part of the time at this point, training to do bookkeeping, as well as the customer service desk. I started to notice the cash balances of cashiers’ tills started to be wildly off. They were usually off by a few cents or dollars here and there, but now they were off by large sums across the board.

7

What was happening is that cashiers were so anxious about having their till open, that they were not doing as good a job counting out change. If they heard the alarm they would just shut the till even if the change amount was wrong – and often clients didn’t immediately notice if amounts were off. You’d be surprised how frequently people don’t count their change. They were also less likely to open their till again if they realized they hadn’t given someone their cash back.

8

You’d also be surprised how many people request cash back and then forget and walk away. Another thing cashiers would do is ask the cashier next to them if they could give them the change or cash back they missed from their till if they were ending a transaction so they didn’t have to open the drawer again. This meant one till would now be down cash and the other till up cash unless the cashiers kept a list of balances to reconcile at the end of their shift… which didn’t seem to be happening.

9

In addition, the customer service desk was now being overrun as cashiers were now refusing to do voids once they hit their daily 10 allowed voids and were sending people out of their line to handle those transactions – resulting in long lines and unhappy customers who now had to go wait in line again to get their bills fixed. So, customers were getting worse service all in the name of micromanaging cashiers to prevent shrinkage.

10

According to what I know, none of these measures impacted shrinkage. In fact, there was a slight increase because staff were no longer voiding things to catch mis-scans, and ringing up something wrong contributes to shrinkage.

Ouroborus13

Oh, and as a little bonus:

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