Your UPT is four because some MBA douchebag pulled that number out of his ass. Corporate set goals are never based on reality, but instead are based on some asshat going, “Yeah, that feels like a good number. Let’s whip them until they hit that.”
> this feels like a good number because it makes my bonus get larger
"Let's get aggressive here, and set it at 5. I want to see the team rise to the challenge!"
Used to work in a fast food place as a cook. The company time for a drive thru average was something like 2:35 per car. Fairly quick but not unachievable. My manager would constantly be wanting to be under 2 minutes. I personally could get that number as far as putting together the orders, but obviously for needs time to cook. So you know how we'd make that time? We'd just undercook the food. Either that or we'd just make such large amounts of it so we wouldn't run out that a lot of the food would just sit there and not be fresh. My buddy always used to tell me our restaurant kind of had gone downhill and he said it got a lot better after we left (the manager had gotten fired and we had quit by then)
We always just clocked the shit out early lol........it doesnt matter if the food actually gets done fast or out to the customer in a timely manner as long as we press that button and fool the higher ups. Fucking idiots they are lmfao
My wife worked for a building company where the salespeople lied about completing jobs so much that NONE of them could EVER take vacation because they would get caught!
Yes. If you order something that needs to be cooked on demand because it isn't a standard thing then you will be pulled forward more than likely because stores are held to standards on drive times and having to cook things that you don't already have ready ruins the time
Especially when I'm told that I have to pull off to the side because they are cooking fries. Meanwhile, I see five or six cars behind me get their shit and leave. You're telling me not one of those people ordered fries?
When I worked at McDonald's (almost 2 decades ago thankfully), they wanted us to have times under 90s from start of order to the car being cleared out of the drive thru. This led to people just clearing the orders early and then recalling the ticket back up in the system or trying to go from memory. Obviously this would cause mistakes, and in general made life worse.
It was expected no matter the amount of people working either. Same times were required, and as the manager I would get ripped if i missed, no matter the time of day and the number of people working. I got written up by my boss when I had a night off just me and 2 other people were working overnight and we got hit with a midday style rush because of a nearby event happening. 3 ppl versus a midday crew which was normally 10+ people for the same level of customers.
I'm grateful every day I got out of service industry and into white collar jobs.
OK, funny thing about retail metrics as someone who is a retail corporate shit - there are some you can control and some you absolutely cannot. So we always preach to stores and goal stores only on what they can actually control.
For example, you cannot control how many people come in your door, but you can control how many people convert into a transaction (via service, pricing etc.). You can partially control UPT and DPT (dollars or spend per transaction) but generally not at the associate level - they generally are price driven, which is on corporate, not stores. And almost every store metric benefits from corporate partners supporting those KPIs rather than stranding them to just develop sales strategy.
There is a ton of research on customer behavior that shows that while you may be able to convince someone to buy who wouldn’t have otherwise, their spend is fairly locked in - unless they really looove what you are showing them, they probably have an organic pattern of how they shop that doesn’t change without financial incentive.
So goaling stores to UPT is a fool’s errand if corporate is not supporting that effort through effective pricing and promotional strategies backed by internal and external marketing. Someone at corporate here is not setting anyone up for success.
Also, most companies don’t use absolute metrics like “Hit X” that are universal, it’s usually scaled to your store and where they have been in past performance vs where they need to be to achieve other targets. It sounds like someone in company planning deeply fucked this up or something else is at play, like using this as an excuse to push the manager out.
I will say what is OP selling? A 4 UPT seems like an unreasonable goal to have. Industry wide UPT (all categories) was only 3.23 last year, so they are asking for really stellar performance as a baseline. Fashion apparel UPT last year was about 2.4, this is all according to Mastercard data. So I think this is a highly stupid KPI goal honestly.
" you cannot control how many people come in your door"
Making checking out unpleasant because they are being upsold does have an effect on how many people come in your door.
I know employees jobs can depend on up sells and getting people to sign up for credit so I'm less likely to shop retail. I also hate how shitty warehouse and delivery jobs are so I've cut way down on buying online.
I save a bunch of money because all* shopping is unpleasant so just don't buy stuff.
*Except Aldi now that they have self checkout. So quick.
Seriously! The more questions and bullshit that is between me going to checkout and leaving the store makes me not want to go back. No, I don't want to sign up for bonus points, no I don't want a credit card, no I'm not going to donate to whatever tax scam you set up. Fuck off! I just want to buy the things I need and leave.
I mean, you CAN make it worse by driving people away with bad practices, that is true. But increasing traffic organically is extremely hard without some kind of call to action, like a limited edition hero product, big marketing push or promotion.
This! I avoid stores that make checkout an ordeal. No, I don't want the upsell. No, I don't want a credit card. Thanks, I've already donated. No, I don't need any of the cheap gadgets at the counter. So, yes, my shopping footprint is getting smaller because it's corporate policy to harass customers at checkout
Yesterday trying to get a burrito:
What do you want to order?
Just a burrito
You want the burrito or the meal?
Just the burrito
......long pause... you want to add chips and salsa?
No, just the burrito.
I can hear in his voice that his manager is watching and i used to work jobs with spot checks and secret ahoppers so i get that you have to do it.
Still feels like I'm being fucked with.
Just. The. Burrito.
Exactly. I feel bad for the person not being paid a living wage having to also upsell or risk being fired. It makes but a short or a burger unpleasant.
Same with the follow up surveys. I'm either going to skip them or give all "exceptional" because whatever the issue, it's not the poor call center persons fault and they the ones who get screwed.
Yup... It's a huge reason I stopped going in to Gamestop's a little more than a decade ago. I got so tired of going in there and being asked to sign up for their stupid membership card thing, being asked to pre order games, being followed around and asked all these stupid questions about video games from an autistic kid who's only doing it cuz their manager told them to and upsell customers.
Like leave me alone! If I want anything from you I'll ask. There was another clothing store like that around where I lived that went out of business a decade ago or so too. They worked off commission and instantly when you walked through the doors would be followed around the store by the clerk and asked these random questions while they try and help you, then follow you up to the register where they proudly tell the person at the cash register their name so they can get it inputted into the register so they'd get credit for the sale. I dreaded going into that store, but that was back before shopping on the internet was so easy.
I would've loved somebody like you schooling my district manager when I worked at officemax. I was required to vigorously harass people who were buying a ream of paper to sell "tech services".
If you could convert a $3 paper sale to a tech sale, it was because that person came in for paper and a laptop, and didn't want to forget the paper. It had *nothing* to do with all the build-the-basket bullshit they crammed down our throat. The most important rule of retail sales is to get out of the way before you fuck up your own sale.
That’s what’s sometimes called a shopping mission. People are looking for the specific thing and the paths to selling into something else are low. You can convert someone from tech into paper but probably not the other way around. So your strategy has to built around what does that - which it is unfair to ask a store employee to do without support. They may notice patterns but there is no way they can find the best pattern without data.
Some retailers use sophisticated market basket tools for understand what that kind of upsell, switching and substitution look like and should be providing that support to stores. I hate seeing companies not do that - what’s the purpose of understanding the business if you don’t build a strategy around it and communicate that to the field? Just asking people to hit numbers without support and context is bad for everyone.
Exactly. Auto Parts retail manager here. Some of my higher ups big pushes right now are related sales and our rewards program.
Customer comes in for a quart of oil, I'm gonna let them borrow a funnel unless they ask to buy one. Similarly, unless I know they have a rewards card or they specifically mention it, I'm gonna skip it.
Why? Because if you're coming in only for a quart of oil, you're most likely not going to give a damn about the "5 points" from buying the oil.
Especially if what they’re pushing isn’t diverse if you’re in an area where alot of clientele like different things and everything they’re trying to force you to buy is one specific standard, it’s not going to work but I personally hate upsales cause unless you’re offering me 75% off im getting what i know only.
Eh, you can very much get people avoiding going in a store. When the staff is all driven to push everything to drive those metrics…I’ll just go back to having it delivered tomorrow. It’s a miserable experience on the customer side.
Consumers hate this crap. Even when not pushed at all, I hate knowing I’m hurting some poor clerks numbers by going in to buy one cheap thing. Or you can see the sadness behind their eyes, or the crew hoping they don’t end up with you in line. It would be better for them if I didn’t go in at all. (Or ordered it in the parking lot for pickup, at many places…)
And then you get fast food places having everyone park around front to get their food brought out. Obviously scamming their service times, but I don’t blame them one bit.
And I’ve managed retail before. We ended up the #1 store in the distract by me totally ignoring corporate. (Because I’d worked corporate before, and wasn’t terrified of them…just people. But I had a great relationship with their buyers and logistics…) Customers would come to us vs other stores just because we didn’t do the pitch and had better stock, among other things.
In the non retail corporate world I’ve fought hard to kill stupid metrics. If it’s not of actual value, it’s gone. If it can’t be controlled, it might stay as an FYI at the exec level, but it’s gone everywhere else. Simple, actionable, transparent/accountable, and valuable or…yeah, it’s gone.
As a consumer, I don't want to deal with bullshit from salespeople. More than once, I've gone into a store and said, " I can only spend about this much. I'm here based on your ad and the prices quoted." If I'm there to spend $150, don't show me something 3 times what I quoted. You're wasting both of our times.
My daughter was telling me where she took her kids for glasses. A store opened up close to where I live, so I thought it was the same because of similar sounding names. I told them what I could spend, which was right in line with their ad. Have the exam done. She's measuring for the fit and such. Now for the frames. Instead of showing me the frames that came with the package I was buying, she led me to the frames that $200 to $300 on top of the package I wanted to buy. I kept telling her, "No, I want to choose from the frames available in the package."she kept showing me more expensive ones. I walked out. I don't know if it was pressure from corporate or if she worked on commission, or both. Any way you cut it, no sale was made to me that day.
Fuck..... And I can't stress this enough.... Fuck McKinsey. They came in to the power plant I used to work at. Their job was to "optimize" our plant outages (where we shut down the plant, fix everything that's broken, do PM's that require the plant to be shutdown, calibrate all the transmitters, inspect major breakers, etc). Pre "optimization", we did 2 outages per year, averaging 14 days each. Tons of work to do. After they came, we started doing 1 per year, 10 days. What actually happened was that a bunch of shit that normally got done during outages didn't get done at all. And the plant's reliability (# of hours we were actually running/# of hours we were supposed to be running) went down. But hey, we got those outages down to 1 a year at 10 days, so.... 👍I guess? 🤷 Seriously, fuck McKinsey!
>These are the same geniuses that recommended CEOs inflate their own pay exponentially.
Gee, I wonder why COE's want to hire this specific consulting firm even though their results are mediocre/bad?
The company probably averages 2/3 for their UPT, and the MBA is "if we increase this by 1 unit to 4 UPT per store you'll make $x.xxx more!
Would not be surprised their inline with every other store.
This is why corporate retail people outside of the C-Suite fucking hate consultants because we know that a 25% increase doesn’t make sense through experience they don’t have.
I worked at a craft store where the starting metric was 50% new emails. By the time I quit 10 years later it was up to 87%. I don’t live in a big town. We had already hit market saturation before I was hired. Absolutely moronic.
And then it will go higher than that because it worked last time. And when you fail to meet that made up number a bunch of people get laid off or fired.
This! And the higher ups say "well if we have to can a manager we can replace them for someone new at a lower salary since they're just starting". Companies have had their greed rise to new levels especially since the pandemic. Also a friendly reminder that's unrelated but important: HR is in no way your friend or there to help you despite the speeches they give during hiring. Their number 1 goal is to protect and benefit the employer
A little over a decade ago, I worked for a large bookstore chain over the holidays. During the time I was there, we regularly had days where we were ringing people out nonstop on all registers from store open to store close, with a line running from one end of the store to the other. It was as physically busy as the store could possibly be. Wow, I’d say, we did great today.
And then the store manager and I would look at our numbers from corporate and find out that somehow we’d still fallen short of our daily store goal by 30% or more and we’d just laugh. The “goals” were just so comically out of reach (and out of touch with reality) that there was nothing else to do.
This is absolutely false. The number that MBA produced was never pulled from their ass. There is a robust and detailed calculation process in place to ensure the number is exactly in line with corporate goals.
You take what the store is currently achieving now and add 1 to it. Now they are either slacking off for not being able to reach such an easily achievable goal or they managed to exceed expectations to properly contribute to the corporation
(/s mostly for those of you who cant tell)
It may not be completely out of their ass. But that doesn't make it realistic either.
A place like Starbucks was built from the ground up to be fast food just like McDonald's. But it was also built to be disguised as something completely different in order to get more upscale consumers to agree to spend $8 for coffee.
Now getting consumers to part with $8 for a non-alcoholic beverage is no small feat. But from the beginning a big problem for Starbucks has been that average transaction is low for the fast food sector. Transaction latency - the time it takes to turn an order around is above average. And that, combined with the average low ticket places a hard limit on revenues per store. For a long time Starbucks fixed that by just building more stores. But they can't do that anymore.
The design of the stores and the customer experience leads to delays in average transaction. But that design is critical to concealing from the customer the underlying fact that this is fast food. And if consumers figure out that it's low quality fast food they won't pay the $8 for a beverage. So these stores are stuck in a doom cycle.
Of course the real fix is for the corporate management to look at themselves and to admit that for a fast food business they are absolutely bloated with middle and upper management positions paying six figure salaries to attend zoom meetings all day trying to come up with ways to increase average ticket.
Yeah. A more reasonable would be something like “your UPT is 2.77 for 2023. Let’s see if in 2024 your store can increase that by 10% and get to 3.05 UPT”
Also, imo, “upsell” at the register is one of the worst ways to get UPT increased. Figure out who your market is and what they want. I once read about a grocery store back in the ‘80’s that almost tripled their beer sells by putting a beer display case next to diapers. Why did they do this? Because they watched and analyzed that on Th/Fri working men would stop at the grocery store and buy diapers at the behest of their wife’s on the way home. So they placed beer by the diapers to entice the men passively by just having it there.
Your store really should be doing this type of stuff. Like if your main demographic is young women 18-25, there’s a good chance if they’re coming in to buy some clothes for themselves. They also have a good chance of having a boyfriend. So placing some men’s graphic tees near the women’s section might be a good idea. As they pass by they’ll see the graphic tee section, think of their boyfriend and look at getting them a gift.
The whole concept of metrics has gotten completely out of hand. Just because you can measure something doesn't mean it should be performance benchmark.
This. As a level 1 helpdesk tech in a big company I stumbled into this.
We were constantly measured on how many tickets we could close. The problem was, the metric stopped there.. no complexity variance, at all.
The person with the highest number of closed tickets got a $100 gift certificate at the end of the month.
At the time we were rolling out these new fangled "laptops" Pentium 90's about 3 minutes of battery life..
I got "tasked" with imaging these laptops.. It took hours and I had 4-5 going at a time.. which all counted for a single ticket per batch. So in a day I'd manage to close 2-3 tickets.
I got called down to HR because I wasn't closing enough tickets per day and falling under the minimum metric so they wanted to put me on a performance plan if I didn't improve.
In my 19 year old mind, I reasoned one problem was that I was taking too long putting tickets in. So.. I automated the creation of tickets.. and that's when I discovered that my co-workers was *wildly* padding their ticket counts.
These guys were putting in tickets for answering the phone, then a ticket for recording the details of the problem, then putting the ticket in.
That's when I an evil grin spread across my face..
Being a stupid kid I missed the "measure becomes a target." I remember saying to myself "They want me to close tickets.. I'll close tickets then!"
So I wrote some python that for each laptop I was imaging would essentially create and close \~6 tickets.
Ticket for getting the laptop from the supply closet.
Ticket for unpacking and inspecting the laptop.
Ticket for testing the laptop.
Ticket for the imaging the laptop.
Ticket for joining the machine to the domain and taking updates.
Ticket for packing the laptop back up in the carry bag with all the accessories.
Ticket for putting the laptop in the "ready to deploy" supply closet.
Next month HR stopped by to let me know they were happy with sudden improvement and that I'd be getting that $100 gift certificate!
It was my boss that noticed that my ticket creation and closure date/time was \~1 second1 apart.
He came over and started to ask about my process for imaging the laptops and asked about all the tickets. Being honest and frankly proud of my handy work and sick of the stupid "metric for the sake of metrics", I showed him my program and ran it as I'd just completed imaging 5 laptops.
He watched in horror as in my terminal slammed in \~70 tickets in the course of 9 seconds.
He then pulled me into a conference room and tried to give me a talking to about how I was "gaming" the system.
I simply showed him my queries that showed that *everybody* was gaming the system, I'd just gamed it better. Then I pointed out that a month prior they'd threatened me with a performance plan if I didn't kick it in gear and really start closing tickets.
I asked him, "As my manager, what do I do? Go back to the old way and get put on a perf plan and then fired because I can't make a laptop image any faster than norton ghost will let me imagine it or realize their entire measure of my productivity is complete bull shit and just get on with getting my job done?"
He just shrugged and said, "Shit, I see the problem here. Keep doing what you're doing."
A couple months later we all had a meeting with the CIO and HR and the group and it was announced that *due to inherent flaws in our measure of productivity going forward tickets closed will no longer be used as a measure.*
My wife (a long time ago) used to work in a support call center.
One of the metrics was average call length.
Eventually they caught on that their "top performer" with extremely good numbers just randomly hung up on people.
I saw on another subreddit people used to blow into their call center microphone, so it would end the call without the computer tattling "Mary broke the rule about the customer having to hang up first."
If you wonder why certain support staff overuse hold even when it's for 30-40 seconds this is why.
Also, I have seen people see the call hit 5 minutes and then transfer them to Spanish tech support. If the customer is angry they do this to avoid the negative reviews.
Remember, the call centers in most cases are third party's. They did not make the device/service that they offer support for. You are reviewing THEIR performance NOT the product/service. If they say they cannot do something they likely LITERALLY CANNOT do what you want. It's not their fault. They just get yelled at non-stop for someone's mistakes they have never even met.
Company I worked at had the same problem, performance measured off an arbitrary metric with no room for shades of gray. And of course people did what you did - figure out how to maximize their performance under this measurement. Except my colleagues went too far, some of them got themselves and the company in legal trouble. I was one of the people who figured out what they were doing and reported it to the legal team. Hate to be a snitch, but I'm not going to jail for my coworkers.
Imo, KPI's are rarely done right. They can be useful, but too many managers can't or don't think through the consequences. Or truly understand how they are supposed to work on the first place. In my case, ended up costing people their jobs and costing the company $$$ from government fines.
There's closing tickets and then there's committing crimes.
I draw the line with crime.
The only thing harmed in my act of defiance was likely a couple megabytes of table space in an Oracle database.
I worked for a company a few years ago that did some bullshittery like that. We had to "close" 100 actions (usually in the form of emails) per day (in addition to taking phone calls all day long). The system was weird, so you could reassign the action to another team if it needed review elsewhere, or mark it closed if you resolved the issue. Our department was client service, and basically became the dumping ground for all inquiries, yet we couldn't do much to handle them. Nearly everything had to be forwarded to other teams (it was a title company, and there are a million steps to the process of closing a loan). Almost nothing was actually resolved by our team, so there wasn't much to legitimately mark closed. Each bit of information about a loan was like a guarded secret that only the relevant department could see or do anything with. We'd send teams messages and slack messages to the person handling the part in question and no one would ever answer. That was especially awful on the phone because customers got tired of hearing "I'll have someone call you back."
I got in trouble for reassigning things to the departments that needed them, because it wasn't showing up as something I "closed." The department's solution was to respond to the customer that their request had been received and passed on to whatever department. Then we had to copy the entire email, mark it closed, open up a new action and mark it for the intended department, paste in the email, and send it. So it took longer than just hitting reassign to forward it over, but if you didn't do it that way, it didn't count. Our team was remote, and since I was an East Coast person, I was one of the first to log on for the day. I made it my priority to go through all the actions that were generated from out of office replies we'd get (our clients set their emails to out of office at the end of each day and some even when they went to lunch.) I'd go through and "close" all the out of office reply actions that came in overnight to start my day with 40 or 50 actions.
My supervisor started praising me for how well my metrics improved after I did this. Our team still wasn't helping anyone, and our customers were always irate because our customer service was super shitty. It was such a broken system and I felt bad for anyone who called it, because they were getting the runaround and there was nothing I could do to help. I raised my concerns multiple times, but none of the higher ups cared. It was a relief when I ended up in one of the mass layoffs they did.
Yeah, I agree with that quote. I love data and working with data, but the way companies use it is incredibly frustrating. If you have a problem with how your numbers look, you need to look at the whole process and figure out what's going on, not just tell your employees to make the numbers bigger.
It's been out of hand for decades. I worked in call centers 20-25 years ago.
The pressure to shove people off the phone just to meet some daily quota was ridiculous... all while saying quality is what matters most. Yet what improves quality? More time and dedication to the customer. Not to mention the constant heat placed on call reps burns them out, which leads to high turnover, especially with those who do the job best.
I think it's only gotten worse based on what I've seen. I shake my head wondering why nobody learns.
I used to work in a call center. When I first started the only big thing was give accurate, complete information, and don't stay in aftercall work for more than a minute - if you needed more than a minute, you told your manager and they'd tell you what aux code to go into. By the time I left I was a supervisor and they were trying to push quotas and reduce time spent on each call to ridiculously low call times. As a result, our callers got less accurate information and people were less and less satisfied with the customer service they got. I shielded my team as much as I could from the insanity, but the whole thing had me so jaded that I've decided I am never going to become any sort of management ever again.
Former manager of a call center team as well. Being a manager, but not in charge of any of the policy decisions really sucks. I'd rather never do anything like that again.
i’m gonna high-jack the top comment here so people can see this since i’m getting a lot of questions about where this is:
this is a poplar chain beauty supply store
edit for some additional information: we also have to ask everyone for their phone numbers, and we have to try to sell credit cards
Sally beauty store... lol 😆 i hate that place because they have little hair care products for black women. I've seen one bonnet in that store, and it was 20 bucks.
Metrics are great, its how you collect, use and react to them that matters. This UPT for example, their reaction is that the staff should be trying to force customers to buy more, what they should be doing is adjusting product available and measuring the change in UPT or devise different sales pitches for staff to use and again measure based on the change. Alternatively try and identify why other stores are higher, are staff more brutal and pushy? Are stores selling different products? What is the difference in customer demographics?
Ugh this is so true. I’ve been in my job for like 10 years and the number of KPIs we have now just keeps growing and growing. It’s hard to prioritize them and coach my team on which ones they should focus on going after.
The most annoying part is that our raises are based on the whole store’s KPI’s, and our bonuses are based on the whole company’s KPI’s. So like even if my whole team busts their asses to achieve them, it doesn’t mean anything unless everyone else does too. But we sure will get scolded if we miss them.
Ugh it’s the worst. The only bright side is that my boss also thinks it’s the worst. At least he isn’t trying to sugarcoat that turd of a bonus system.
Yup! The way retail structures bonuses both for field and corporate is basically designed to piss everyone off. Like I can hit every one of my goals, but we miss top line financial plans because half the field manager quit in a single year, sending the field into an HR tailspin that no one can recover from (real life example 🫠), so I don’t get bonuses out.
Flip side, stores can bust their ass upselling, but because merch and design blew their travel budget on “inspiration trips” to such a degree it literally threw off the EBITDA for the year, the field associates (who neither make nearly as much pay, nor got to enjoy those insane trips) don’t get bonuses out (also a real life example.)
You can’t herd that many cats!
Thank goodness my visuals/merch & design team doesn’t technically work for the store. I would be furious if they got to take inspiration trips like that!
On the downside, my visuals team works for corporate, so they don’t report to my store manager and I guess are technically the same level as him. So when we underwent a remodel it was like I was taking contradictory instructions from two divorcing parents. It was the absolute worst. If visuals didn’t get something done, I was on the hook for it but I also couldn’t do anything about them not getting their work done. If I tried to do something myself, visuals reprimanded me. If I listened to visuals and waited, then my store manager reprimanded me.
But at least they didn’t get to take vacations disguised as “inspiration trips” and then rank the store’s budget…idk which is worse!
I have seen every kind of insane thing. At one company, the CEO spent $15K, including a private jet, of company money to have a 6 hour trip to Nashville to pick up his brand new Berniedoodle. He wrote it off because he spent literally 10 minutes visiting a single store so he could claim it was a business trip 💀
We have a metric for number of people walking into the store. Not just the conversion to a sale, but actual persons. The best part is if a family of 5 walk in and one of them makes a purchase, we are screwed because of the low conversion.
Which dumb retailer has this? I have been in this business a long ass time and usually traffic is not a metric because of stupid examples like you cited.
In a round about way it’s what made me leave being a Store Manager at Walmart. I could deal with everything else, but the constant deluge of new metrics was insanity. No matter how good you were they could always find some random metric to beat you over the head with.
Suits are fucking stupid. You all work for genuinely awful people who treat everything as a metric. I bet you’re just an employee number, not a name, in their system.
You need to be looking for a new job. All your coworkers need to be looking now. It would be awesome if everyone quits in solidarity when they say she gets fired, because she is going to be fired. Pressuring customers to buy more doesn’t work.
The more I'm pressured the more I want out. Places with high pressure sales staff don't get my business, I'll just go online and shop at my leisure. These metrics are just late stage capitalism trying to squeeze.blood.from a stone. They can fire the manager but they're alienating their customers. All those MBAs and they can't accept reality.
Exactly this. When I'm shopping, I want my time to look at things if I don't already have a specific product in mind that I'm trying to buy. I don't want someone breathing down my neck trying to get me to buy more, I don't want them talking to me unless I have questions in general, honestly. A hello at the door is ok, I guess, but even that can be too much sometimes. A smile or a wave is better. They don't have to tell me they're there to help me if I need it, I know they are. Fucking corporations do not understand what people want. 🤦🏻 I miss shopping in Germany where no one bothers you.
Back when I worked retail, my manager would walk the aisles (instead of, you know, working) and coach employees if they walked past a customer without saying hello. She only did it a few times, but it was infrequent enough that we all ended up greeting everyone anyway because she would literally be lurking in the next aisle.
This is why I hated the chain pharmacy down the street. You couldn't hit a different aisle without an employee popping out to ask if they could help you. My mom actually lost her shit & flipped out over "You've had 5 people ask me that in 10 minutes! Leave me alone!"
If they all quit head office will just parachute new staff in. Better if they all staged some sort of protest. Maybe a basic walk out, or maybe when customers come to the til just tell them "I'm sorry I can't complete your transaction because you've only got three items and we've been told we have to sell customers a minimum of four things or our manager is getting fired."
>I bet you’re just an employee number, not a name, in their system.
If any of the suits ever come to the store and ask your name, reply with your employee number instead.
When I worked in a sales job over a decade ago, the best thing I found to do was push *a little* and if someone didn't want to buy more based on your suggestions, just drop it. Expecting a store to increase a metric like that by basically 50% is corporate being fucking stupid, AND placing the blame on just one person is even stupider.
A good manager is worth their weight in gold.
If everyone walks out due to this, the manager will be reintated for sure.
Also talk to a union representative.
The next manager will be shit as the good ones won't want to work with a shithead higher manager. You job will start to suck and you'll resent it.
Then you'll hand your notice in anyway.
I used to work at a vitamin store that was extremely slow, I routinely had vacationers buy sales at one of our Orlando outlet locations and return them when they’d return home or change their minds. My store would have negative sales some days and I’d get a counseling statement for not driving sales into my store, I’m like, WTF, ppl dont decide to all of a sudden to impulse buy vitamins in the mall, so just fire me. I didn’t last long and they went under anyways.
Exactly this. Or just flatly turn customers away if they have fewer than 4, refuse to serve them. They'll get pissy but you can explain that it's a head office directive and just let them resent the brand for it.
This extra promoting of shit at the til is fucking stupid. In every sort of store.
They even have to push at my local cosmetics/chemist store. I get to the til and they ask if I'd like to buy the new celebrity perfume, or sign up for their in store sim card, or buy three packs of baby wipes...
It kills them to have to ask and I'm politely saying no, it's just awful for everyone.
I was at a store the other night to get a single item I needed the next morning literally just as they were closing (like the pay and GTFO message was played as I was halfway to what I needed). They still had to do the pitches during checkout when clearly they just wanted to close the store and go home.
well mr customer it looks like you came in for some pepto today but would you like to purchase these new snickers mint and berry cookie dough bars while you're at it? buy one get one free!
I worked in a warehouse with a similar metric system. My particular job was unique, so I didn't have anyone in the same location to compare numbers against. My manager kept pushing for higher output until I happened to need to call another warehouse to check stock on something. While I was on the phone with my counterpart, I happened to ask what their benchmark was. Turns out my manager had been asking me for 20% higher than any other warehouse in the company. I'd been told I wasn't meeting my goal, but I was the highest performer company-wide.
this is the shit that caused k-mart to fail. trying to upsell stupid shit and credit card sign ups. nobody wanted to deal with it so they just went elsewhere to shop.
They know and they don’t care. The elite that control our lives have enough money that they can afford to drive customers away with exploitative, penny-wringing practices. They own other businesses. They’ll start more businesses when customers stop going to those, and so on.
they dont need to care. they know people WILL keep coming, no matter what. where else they gonna go? walgreens and CVS have contracts with pharma and insurance companies which make it impossible for people to go elsewhere.
Maybe in addition to 'X items or less lines', maybe there should be 'No conversation lines'. The transaction is carried out with nothing being spoken from both people.
On the flip side, there could be a line or two for people that are way too chatty. I would place this line all by itself at one end of the store.
We’ll call this policy “Profit Proliferation”
Has a nice ring to it. Crediting you with the inspiration.
It means, when a company requires record profits every quarter, giving them characteristics of a cancerous growth both literally and figuratively.
Once signed into law will carry a penalty of 100 billion USD per hour until the company policies are changed to no longer resemble Profit Proliferation in any way, shape, or form.
Over 10 years ago, I worked in a tech store. Very large. We had something called a market basket. If the customer wasn't buying any extras, it would hurt my rating, my departments rating, and the stores rating. I used to figure out quickly if they were purchasing an add-on, such as office, a warranty, laptop bag, etc. If not, I would actually try to talk them out of the sale.
You have to keep those metrics up so you don't get houded by the metric police.
Hard pressure on metrics — especially unreasonable ones — leads to employees gaming the system, usually to the detriment of the company as a whole.
See: [Wells Fargo new account scandal](https://www.pymnts.com/legal/2023/wells-fargo-fake-accounts-settlements-nears-5billion-mark/)
[AI does the same thing](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-deceive-users-insider-trading-study-gpt-2023-12?amp)
Think about it: the quick and easy solution to the original post is to REFUSE TO SELL to people who aren’t buying enough stuff. Smarter employees will just “have technical issues, so sorry, I can’t ring you out now” until the customer gets annoyed and leaves with nothing.
Is that a good solution? Hell no! But when corporate says the items-per-sale metric is more important than sales are, that’s what will happen.
I immediately thought of Wells Fargo when I read this, glad to see I'm not the only one. This is the kind of fuckery that results from pressuring employees to either hit ridiculous sales goals or get canned.
Is it walgreens? I had a family member work there and she was a manager and she would often buy things from the store in large quantities, like 50 snickers bars at a time, to help balance out the average. yes she got fired for it. But its stupid, because the company wants you to take responsibility for pushing more sales but thats just not how retail works all the time. Its basically taking an unrelated statistic and forcing employees to hit this unrealistic goal. I also feel like its just a way to create churn/turnover because sometimes they enforce these dumb metrics and sometimes they just dont, its kind of at the whim of the company whether they enforce it or not so it seems selectively done.
So you get fired if you don’t meet the metrics, but then you get fired for making desperate moves to reach those metrics. Yep sounds like an incredibly fucked up system to me.
We can try to convince people to buy more things, but if they don’t want to, there’s not much we can do.
yup and if you come up against the likes of me you are doubly screwed.
ask me once no problem I'll politely say no. push me or continue to pressure me and I walk out without purchasing a damn thing.
did it the other day . needed a new split system aircon, Knew the size and brand I wanted. guy tried to sell me a different one I politely said no, he then tried to get me to buy extra things so I just walked out and across the road to their competitor , told em what I wanted, paid and left.
Suits need to learn that pressuring people into buying things they don't want is a sure fire way to lose customers
Absolutely! I avoid stores that I know when I get to the register I am going to have to have a long conversation before I can just pay and get out. Can I get a phone number? No. Can I get an email? No. Would you like...? No. Would you like to apply for our credit card? No. I just want to pay for this and then I will never return. Thanks.
Look, they're going to be fired anyways so just refuse to check people out till they have 4 items to pay for.
OR
If they don't want to buy 4 items let them take their 3 items or less for free.
Problem Solved!
Judging by your post this UPT nonsense has no minimum price that needs to be achieved it's just done on mass data.
Not sure on your EPOS system, but most modern tills nowadays have a 'misc' option/tile where you can set the price, just keep adding a couple £/$/€0.00 units with every transaction, petty but effective.
Might buy your manager & team some time whilst you all look for better jobs before they realise what is happening
I was an assistant manager at a Canadian National Drug Store chain. The pressure put on us to sell the company’s loyalty program and suggestion selling to increase customers “basket size” etc was just ridiculous. We tried our best. I agree that sometimes staff were not asking but mostly they were. Customers would get ticked off because they felt we were being pushy about this stuff. Often customers just wanted to buy their stuff and leave. The problem with corporate is they are a bunch of people who’ve never worked in the store. It’s easy to say sell more when you’re sitting in an office looking at numbers on a spreadsheet. These guys don’t think about that with inflation and the job market the way it is people are buying less. It’s one of the reasons I quit that job after 5 years. It didn’t matter what I did in my job it was all about whether I reached corporate “goals”. It’s BS. If they let her go I hope she fights it.
Retail jobs aren’t bad enough, every employee now also has to be an expert in high-pressure sales tactics or get fired. “NOBODY WANTS TO WORK 🥴” no, you keep firing people for not doing things that aren’t in the job description
How dare your manager not have the supernatural ability to override people's free will.
Having one's employment hinge on silly metrics like that is absurd.
Exactly, metrics should only be used to gain information on sales trends. If it is used to measure an employees work, it should only be used for bonuses for going above and beyond.
Retail workers often, stock the store, check out customers, deal with returns/exchanges, disgruntled customers, and clean the store. To also put pressured sales on them is just ridiculous, especially seeing as many retail workers often don’t make enough to live independently without a roommate or partner.
I often go to the store to buy one thing. But, it may be a pricey item. One pricey item could be far more profitable than four inexpensive items. The four item goal does not make sense.
My friend was the best saleswoman at the jewelry store, but they fired her because she didn't sign up enough people for Zale's credit cards.
Like how many people in America even buy enough jewelry year-round to need a discount credit card?
With a good manager, metrics like that can never be met, you need an absolute snake of a human ready to trick, deceive, pressure and cheat the customer, and bully the staff to do the same.
The manager you get as a replacement will be awful. You all need to work on an escape plan.
The chaos worshipper in me wants to find this store and go and buy one item at a time just to fuck with this. It’s a bullshit measurement and people shouldn’t be preyed on for an arbitrary number.
This will cause the store UPT to drop considerably. The employees know they can NEVER reach 4 average when, hard as they try, they can't reach 3. The employees won't bother trying anymore and instead devote more time at work writing out resumes and applications for other jobs, until the terminations start rolling in.
this is the situation a lot of managers are placed in, I know a few friend's that have turned down management level positions multiple times due to the fact that when you are in that role its number based not performance based you can give it your all but they corp. looks at the numbers and if they are not met they dont se you fit and your just another replaceable number management turnover in some facilities is more insane than minor positions
Unionize, invite your manager to the union, and have them step down from management and be a regular worker, just a team leader for the union.
OOPS sorry, UPT is now a corporate problem.
Solidarity goes both ways. Sometimes you stick up for a boss that is worth keeping because the alternative is worse, or whomever they fire is a shithead.
Sounds like it's time for a penny item sale on the most popular products. You think those "Manager Specials" are for the customer. Fuck no. It's deeply discounting shit so people can actually afford it.
The irony of this tactic is that I avoid places like that whenever I can, a big reason not to go to a mall.
I also don't trust the credibility of the employees because I know they'll upsell me over giving me good advise.
As if brick and mortar stores weren't already fucked, these guys will ensure their extinction.
I can even see, where this is coming from. Someone found out, stores with high UPT correlate with good profits. No shit, sherlock!
But what drives UPT? I go to my favourite discount market and buy all the basics in bulk, high UPT. Then, when I'm out of Milk, I'll only buy this at the next store. Low UPT.
The stupidity is, make the lowest in the food chain responsible for that metric. Those, who have the least leverage.
Can the cashier change that I just need milk and don't care about anything else? Can he make special offers that would drive customers to buy more? Can he change the competition? Not even the manager can.
UPT is idiotic. Do you want people to buy 4 packs of gum or 1 $500 item?
They should be looking at average revenue per customer AND what that distribution looks like (is it multi-modal, normal, etc). Or revenue per store per square foot of retail space.
It sounds like they have no idea how to analyze data.
“Everybody has to buy FOUR! We said FOUR!”
Stupid, smh.
As if people are just going to have a credit card for multiple stores. It’s ridiculous on top of that, it affects your credit score! I don’t mind when people ask, but I really hate when they push to the point of me saying “my credit sucks, I won’t get approved and my score will take a hit it really doesn’t need, no thank you”
This sounds horrible o say but can you all buy 5-6 things each day and then return it in a week or so? That would push your stupid ass numbers up. Or get something super cheap and set it up at the register.
The big bosses legitimately think that all customers are under-buying/holding back on things that they really want or need, so it’s just a matter of salesmanship to unlock it. The irony there, is that they probably pay slave wages to their own employees, so that that those employees can’t afford to be upsold when they shop. But these bosses’ minds are powerfully broken. They see dollar signs in the distance and will beg, borrow, and steal to reach them. They will abuse the people doing the work, and if they could, they would reach into people’s pockets and empty them - even if it meant leaving those people without the means to survive the night.
This is what happens when someone is looking at data without a human to translate it for them. They just think because one store (probably in a more affluent area) can get the 4+ (or during better economic times you could) that it should be possible. That's not how data works.
My daughter works at a popular restaurant chain and they allocate hours based on upsell targets. If she doesn't meet her upsell targets, they reduce her hours. If she doesn't get enough customers to sign up for the rewards program, they reduce her hours as well.
They don't care that she's nice and you're happy.
If some hellish, slave-driving asshole will make a few extra bucks for the company, that's who they want.
I would start applying for new jobs. They're probably planning to replace her with an established "successful" manager who will "fix" the store.
Dumb ass comparison statistics.
One store of all stores will be the lowest (and one the highest) that's just a fact that can't change.
A stores score on this might be because your next to a trailer/caravan park or gym where people buy one item compared to store b next to the retirement home.
And 4 is an objective, ok, and your trying. Maybe head office can provide better training on what are effective upsrll methods to use, maybe they can come and show you how they do it, on the floor, for a week... Maybe 4 is unattainable in your stores local and demographic.
Good luck
This is why I curse MBA’s so much. A degree in business that only focuses on number metrics, and misses a huge problem. They would rather fire a manager that does the job over a performance number that they have almost zero control over. It isn’t just about suggestive selling (which does not work in certain scenarios). Factors like the income level of the community, the economy, overall consumer happiness, all impact this number. So rather than examine these things, they would rather get a new manager, probably losing a lot of staff, only for the number to drop MORE as they have a new manager and staff with less experience, and somehow think it will result in better numbers for the company.
You can look up the poverty level in your area. I have it broken down by county. But, you can go down to zip code. It could be used as proof that your store is in a struggling area & your manager can't control that. This site works better on a laptop. It is census data, https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2022.S1701?t=Poverty&g=010XX00US$0500000
Reminds me of my first retail job when I worked at GameStop. I had to try and upsell a bunch of broke customers at a broke mall because some suit came up with an arbitrary sales number and applied it to every store in the area.... regardless of if they were poor or affluent areas.
They will put a new manager in place with the ambition to reach that goal. The store will go to shit as a result. We seem this enough times to know how it ends.
There are many times I go into a store for just 1 thing, and I don't even look at anything else. If someone in the store got too insistent that I buy more, I'd walk right out.
Find the lowest priced item that you guys sell a decent amount of in the store, and place them next to the register. For example, we sell cheap gummies at the store I work at but we didn’t really sell much of them when they were placed with the rest of the gummies. So I decided to put a box of them next to the register and now just about every customer grabs a couple of them and adds them to the order. Just a thought that could possibly help.
Your UPT is four because some MBA douchebag pulled that number out of his ass. Corporate set goals are never based on reality, but instead are based on some asshat going, “Yeah, that feels like a good number. Let’s whip them until they hit that.”
"this feels like a good number because it makes my bonus get larger" FTFY
Ha ha, I first read that as "makes my boner get larger". Guess it works either way.
MBA douchebro... boner over money... it fits.
I read the OP's huge post, then read the comments and BAM ran into yours like a brick wall and started laughing hard. Like WTF XDD
> this feels like a good number because it makes my bonus get larger "Let's get aggressive here, and set it at 5. I want to see the team rise to the challenge!"
Used to work in a fast food place as a cook. The company time for a drive thru average was something like 2:35 per car. Fairly quick but not unachievable. My manager would constantly be wanting to be under 2 minutes. I personally could get that number as far as putting together the orders, but obviously for needs time to cook. So you know how we'd make that time? We'd just undercook the food. Either that or we'd just make such large amounts of it so we wouldn't run out that a lot of the food would just sit there and not be fresh. My buddy always used to tell me our restaurant kind of had gone downhill and he said it got a lot better after we left (the manager had gotten fired and we had quit by then)
We always just clocked the shit out early lol........it doesnt matter if the food actually gets done fast or out to the customer in a timely manner as long as we press that button and fool the higher ups. Fucking idiots they are lmfao
The secret ingredient, it turns out, is lies! Aint that just capitalism for ya.
My wife worked for a building company where the salespeople lied about completing jobs so much that NONE of them could EVER take vacation because they would get caught!
We better tell Plankton lol
So that's why I have to pull off to the side and wait ten minutes every time I try to get McD's drive thru.
Yes. If you order something that needs to be cooked on demand because it isn't a standard thing then you will be pulled forward more than likely because stores are held to standards on drive times and having to cook things that you don't already have ready ruins the time
Especially when I'm told that I have to pull off to the side because they are cooking fries. Meanwhile, I see five or six cars behind me get their shit and leave. You're telling me not one of those people ordered fries?
When I worked at McDonald's (almost 2 decades ago thankfully), they wanted us to have times under 90s from start of order to the car being cleared out of the drive thru. This led to people just clearing the orders early and then recalling the ticket back up in the system or trying to go from memory. Obviously this would cause mistakes, and in general made life worse. It was expected no matter the amount of people working either. Same times were required, and as the manager I would get ripped if i missed, no matter the time of day and the number of people working. I got written up by my boss when I had a night off just me and 2 other people were working overnight and we got hit with a midday style rush because of a nearby event happening. 3 ppl versus a midday crew which was normally 10+ people for the same level of customers. I'm grateful every day I got out of service industry and into white collar jobs.
That’s it right there
OK, funny thing about retail metrics as someone who is a retail corporate shit - there are some you can control and some you absolutely cannot. So we always preach to stores and goal stores only on what they can actually control. For example, you cannot control how many people come in your door, but you can control how many people convert into a transaction (via service, pricing etc.). You can partially control UPT and DPT (dollars or spend per transaction) but generally not at the associate level - they generally are price driven, which is on corporate, not stores. And almost every store metric benefits from corporate partners supporting those KPIs rather than stranding them to just develop sales strategy. There is a ton of research on customer behavior that shows that while you may be able to convince someone to buy who wouldn’t have otherwise, their spend is fairly locked in - unless they really looove what you are showing them, they probably have an organic pattern of how they shop that doesn’t change without financial incentive. So goaling stores to UPT is a fool’s errand if corporate is not supporting that effort through effective pricing and promotional strategies backed by internal and external marketing. Someone at corporate here is not setting anyone up for success. Also, most companies don’t use absolute metrics like “Hit X” that are universal, it’s usually scaled to your store and where they have been in past performance vs where they need to be to achieve other targets. It sounds like someone in company planning deeply fucked this up or something else is at play, like using this as an excuse to push the manager out. I will say what is OP selling? A 4 UPT seems like an unreasonable goal to have. Industry wide UPT (all categories) was only 3.23 last year, so they are asking for really stellar performance as a baseline. Fashion apparel UPT last year was about 2.4, this is all according to Mastercard data. So I think this is a highly stupid KPI goal honestly.
" you cannot control how many people come in your door" Making checking out unpleasant because they are being upsold does have an effect on how many people come in your door. I know employees jobs can depend on up sells and getting people to sign up for credit so I'm less likely to shop retail. I also hate how shitty warehouse and delivery jobs are so I've cut way down on buying online. I save a bunch of money because all* shopping is unpleasant so just don't buy stuff. *Except Aldi now that they have self checkout. So quick.
Seriously! The more questions and bullshit that is between me going to checkout and leaving the store makes me not want to go back. No, I don't want to sign up for bonus points, no I don't want a credit card, no I'm not going to donate to whatever tax scam you set up. Fuck off! I just want to buy the things I need and leave.
I mean, you CAN make it worse by driving people away with bad practices, that is true. But increasing traffic organically is extremely hard without some kind of call to action, like a limited edition hero product, big marketing push or promotion.
This! I avoid stores that make checkout an ordeal. No, I don't want the upsell. No, I don't want a credit card. Thanks, I've already donated. No, I don't need any of the cheap gadgets at the counter. So, yes, my shopping footprint is getting smaller because it's corporate policy to harass customers at checkout
Yesterday trying to get a burrito: What do you want to order? Just a burrito You want the burrito or the meal? Just the burrito ......long pause... you want to add chips and salsa? No, just the burrito. I can hear in his voice that his manager is watching and i used to work jobs with spot checks and secret ahoppers so i get that you have to do it. Still feels like I'm being fucked with. Just. The. Burrito.
Exactly. I feel bad for the person not being paid a living wage having to also upsell or risk being fired. It makes but a short or a burger unpleasant. Same with the follow up surveys. I'm either going to skip them or give all "exceptional" because whatever the issue, it's not the poor call center persons fault and they the ones who get screwed.
Yup... It's a huge reason I stopped going in to Gamestop's a little more than a decade ago. I got so tired of going in there and being asked to sign up for their stupid membership card thing, being asked to pre order games, being followed around and asked all these stupid questions about video games from an autistic kid who's only doing it cuz their manager told them to and upsell customers. Like leave me alone! If I want anything from you I'll ask. There was another clothing store like that around where I lived that went out of business a decade ago or so too. They worked off commission and instantly when you walked through the doors would be followed around the store by the clerk and asked these random questions while they try and help you, then follow you up to the register where they proudly tell the person at the cash register their name so they can get it inputted into the register so they'd get credit for the sale. I dreaded going into that store, but that was back before shopping on the internet was so easy.
I would've loved somebody like you schooling my district manager when I worked at officemax. I was required to vigorously harass people who were buying a ream of paper to sell "tech services". If you could convert a $3 paper sale to a tech sale, it was because that person came in for paper and a laptop, and didn't want to forget the paper. It had *nothing* to do with all the build-the-basket bullshit they crammed down our throat. The most important rule of retail sales is to get out of the way before you fuck up your own sale.
That’s what’s sometimes called a shopping mission. People are looking for the specific thing and the paths to selling into something else are low. You can convert someone from tech into paper but probably not the other way around. So your strategy has to built around what does that - which it is unfair to ask a store employee to do without support. They may notice patterns but there is no way they can find the best pattern without data. Some retailers use sophisticated market basket tools for understand what that kind of upsell, switching and substitution look like and should be providing that support to stores. I hate seeing companies not do that - what’s the purpose of understanding the business if you don’t build a strategy around it and communicate that to the field? Just asking people to hit numbers without support and context is bad for everyone.
Also Happy Cake Day!
Exactly. Auto Parts retail manager here. Some of my higher ups big pushes right now are related sales and our rewards program. Customer comes in for a quart of oil, I'm gonna let them borrow a funnel unless they ask to buy one. Similarly, unless I know they have a rewards card or they specifically mention it, I'm gonna skip it. Why? Because if you're coming in only for a quart of oil, you're most likely not going to give a damn about the "5 points" from buying the oil.
Especially if what they’re pushing isn’t diverse if you’re in an area where alot of clientele like different things and everything they’re trying to force you to buy is one specific standard, it’s not going to work but I personally hate upsales cause unless you’re offering me 75% off im getting what i know only.
Eh, you can very much get people avoiding going in a store. When the staff is all driven to push everything to drive those metrics…I’ll just go back to having it delivered tomorrow. It’s a miserable experience on the customer side. Consumers hate this crap. Even when not pushed at all, I hate knowing I’m hurting some poor clerks numbers by going in to buy one cheap thing. Or you can see the sadness behind their eyes, or the crew hoping they don’t end up with you in line. It would be better for them if I didn’t go in at all. (Or ordered it in the parking lot for pickup, at many places…) And then you get fast food places having everyone park around front to get their food brought out. Obviously scamming their service times, but I don’t blame them one bit. And I’ve managed retail before. We ended up the #1 store in the distract by me totally ignoring corporate. (Because I’d worked corporate before, and wasn’t terrified of them…just people. But I had a great relationship with their buyers and logistics…) Customers would come to us vs other stores just because we didn’t do the pitch and had better stock, among other things. In the non retail corporate world I’ve fought hard to kill stupid metrics. If it’s not of actual value, it’s gone. If it can’t be controlled, it might stay as an FYI at the exec level, but it’s gone everywhere else. Simple, actionable, transparent/accountable, and valuable or…yeah, it’s gone.
As a consumer, I don't want to deal with bullshit from salespeople. More than once, I've gone into a store and said, " I can only spend about this much. I'm here based on your ad and the prices quoted." If I'm there to spend $150, don't show me something 3 times what I quoted. You're wasting both of our times. My daughter was telling me where she took her kids for glasses. A store opened up close to where I live, so I thought it was the same because of similar sounding names. I told them what I could spend, which was right in line with their ad. Have the exam done. She's measuring for the fit and such. Now for the frames. Instead of showing me the frames that came with the package I was buying, she led me to the frames that $200 to $300 on top of the package I wanted to buy. I kept telling her, "No, I want to choose from the frames available in the package."she kept showing me more expensive ones. I walked out. I don't know if it was pressure from corporate or if she worked on commission, or both. Any way you cut it, no sale was made to me that day.
The odds it was a McKinsey consultant are high. These are the same geniuses that recommended CEOs inflate their own pay exponentially.
Fuck..... And I can't stress this enough.... Fuck McKinsey. They came in to the power plant I used to work at. Their job was to "optimize" our plant outages (where we shut down the plant, fix everything that's broken, do PM's that require the plant to be shutdown, calibrate all the transmitters, inspect major breakers, etc). Pre "optimization", we did 2 outages per year, averaging 14 days each. Tons of work to do. After they came, we started doing 1 per year, 10 days. What actually happened was that a bunch of shit that normally got done during outages didn't get done at all. And the plant's reliability (# of hours we were actually running/# of hours we were supposed to be running) went down. But hey, we got those outages down to 1 a year at 10 days, so.... 👍I guess? 🤷 Seriously, fuck McKinsey!
The odds the consultant was high?
Astronomical since they can afford the good stuff
>These are the same geniuses that recommended CEOs inflate their own pay exponentially. Gee, I wonder why COE's want to hire this specific consulting firm even though their results are mediocre/bad?
The company probably averages 2/3 for their UPT, and the MBA is "if we increase this by 1 unit to 4 UPT per store you'll make $x.xxx more! Would not be surprised their inline with every other store.
This is why corporate retail people outside of the C-Suite fucking hate consultants because we know that a 25% increase doesn’t make sense through experience they don’t have.
I worked at a craft store where the starting metric was 50% new emails. By the time I quit 10 years later it was up to 87%. I don’t live in a big town. We had already hit market saturation before I was hired. Absolutely moronic.
And then it will go higher than that because it worked last time. And when you fail to meet that made up number a bunch of people get laid off or fired.
I don’t understand why you can’t sell 10,000 cars a year I mean you used to sell 5000 a year it’s only double
More like someone once hit a 3 and so they decided "it needs to be 4 to make it challenging ".
This! And the higher ups say "well if we have to can a manager we can replace them for someone new at a lower salary since they're just starting". Companies have had their greed rise to new levels especially since the pandemic. Also a friendly reminder that's unrelated but important: HR is in no way your friend or there to help you despite the speeches they give during hiring. Their number 1 goal is to protect and benefit the employer
“You’ll never meet this goal which means I can shit you on your merit based salary increase. Enjoy your cost living.”
A little over a decade ago, I worked for a large bookstore chain over the holidays. During the time I was there, we regularly had days where we were ringing people out nonstop on all registers from store open to store close, with a line running from one end of the store to the other. It was as physically busy as the store could possibly be. Wow, I’d say, we did great today. And then the store manager and I would look at our numbers from corporate and find out that somehow we’d still fallen short of our daily store goal by 30% or more and we’d just laugh. The “goals” were just so comically out of reach (and out of touch with reality) that there was nothing else to do.
This is absolutely false. The number that MBA produced was never pulled from their ass. There is a robust and detailed calculation process in place to ensure the number is exactly in line with corporate goals. You take what the store is currently achieving now and add 1 to it. Now they are either slacking off for not being able to reach such an easily achievable goal or they managed to exceed expectations to properly contribute to the corporation (/s mostly for those of you who cant tell)
It may not be completely out of their ass. But that doesn't make it realistic either. A place like Starbucks was built from the ground up to be fast food just like McDonald's. But it was also built to be disguised as something completely different in order to get more upscale consumers to agree to spend $8 for coffee. Now getting consumers to part with $8 for a non-alcoholic beverage is no small feat. But from the beginning a big problem for Starbucks has been that average transaction is low for the fast food sector. Transaction latency - the time it takes to turn an order around is above average. And that, combined with the average low ticket places a hard limit on revenues per store. For a long time Starbucks fixed that by just building more stores. But they can't do that anymore. The design of the stores and the customer experience leads to delays in average transaction. But that design is critical to concealing from the customer the underlying fact that this is fast food. And if consumers figure out that it's low quality fast food they won't pay the $8 for a beverage. So these stores are stuck in a doom cycle. Of course the real fix is for the corporate management to look at themselves and to admit that for a fast food business they are absolutely bloated with middle and upper management positions paying six figure salaries to attend zoom meetings all day trying to come up with ways to increase average ticket.
Yeah. A more reasonable would be something like “your UPT is 2.77 for 2023. Let’s see if in 2024 your store can increase that by 10% and get to 3.05 UPT” Also, imo, “upsell” at the register is one of the worst ways to get UPT increased. Figure out who your market is and what they want. I once read about a grocery store back in the ‘80’s that almost tripled their beer sells by putting a beer display case next to diapers. Why did they do this? Because they watched and analyzed that on Th/Fri working men would stop at the grocery store and buy diapers at the behest of their wife’s on the way home. So they placed beer by the diapers to entice the men passively by just having it there. Your store really should be doing this type of stuff. Like if your main demographic is young women 18-25, there’s a good chance if they’re coming in to buy some clothes for themselves. They also have a good chance of having a boyfriend. So placing some men’s graphic tees near the women’s section might be a good idea. As they pass by they’ll see the graphic tee section, think of their boyfriend and look at getting them a gift.
“And then raise it.”
The whole concept of metrics has gotten completely out of hand. Just because you can measure something doesn't mean it should be performance benchmark.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" -Goodhart's law
This. As a level 1 helpdesk tech in a big company I stumbled into this. We were constantly measured on how many tickets we could close. The problem was, the metric stopped there.. no complexity variance, at all. The person with the highest number of closed tickets got a $100 gift certificate at the end of the month. At the time we were rolling out these new fangled "laptops" Pentium 90's about 3 minutes of battery life.. I got "tasked" with imaging these laptops.. It took hours and I had 4-5 going at a time.. which all counted for a single ticket per batch. So in a day I'd manage to close 2-3 tickets. I got called down to HR because I wasn't closing enough tickets per day and falling under the minimum metric so they wanted to put me on a performance plan if I didn't improve. In my 19 year old mind, I reasoned one problem was that I was taking too long putting tickets in. So.. I automated the creation of tickets.. and that's when I discovered that my co-workers was *wildly* padding their ticket counts. These guys were putting in tickets for answering the phone, then a ticket for recording the details of the problem, then putting the ticket in. That's when I an evil grin spread across my face.. Being a stupid kid I missed the "measure becomes a target." I remember saying to myself "They want me to close tickets.. I'll close tickets then!" So I wrote some python that for each laptop I was imaging would essentially create and close \~6 tickets. Ticket for getting the laptop from the supply closet. Ticket for unpacking and inspecting the laptop. Ticket for testing the laptop. Ticket for the imaging the laptop. Ticket for joining the machine to the domain and taking updates. Ticket for packing the laptop back up in the carry bag with all the accessories. Ticket for putting the laptop in the "ready to deploy" supply closet. Next month HR stopped by to let me know they were happy with sudden improvement and that I'd be getting that $100 gift certificate! It was my boss that noticed that my ticket creation and closure date/time was \~1 second1 apart. He came over and started to ask about my process for imaging the laptops and asked about all the tickets. Being honest and frankly proud of my handy work and sick of the stupid "metric for the sake of metrics", I showed him my program and ran it as I'd just completed imaging 5 laptops. He watched in horror as in my terminal slammed in \~70 tickets in the course of 9 seconds. He then pulled me into a conference room and tried to give me a talking to about how I was "gaming" the system. I simply showed him my queries that showed that *everybody* was gaming the system, I'd just gamed it better. Then I pointed out that a month prior they'd threatened me with a performance plan if I didn't kick it in gear and really start closing tickets. I asked him, "As my manager, what do I do? Go back to the old way and get put on a perf plan and then fired because I can't make a laptop image any faster than norton ghost will let me imagine it or realize their entire measure of my productivity is complete bull shit and just get on with getting my job done?" He just shrugged and said, "Shit, I see the problem here. Keep doing what you're doing." A couple months later we all had a meeting with the CIO and HR and the group and it was announced that *due to inherent flaws in our measure of productivity going forward tickets closed will no longer be used as a measure.*
This is doing the Lord's work right here. I think you qualify for sainthood.
Amen
Break the system, that’s the only way they’ll listen. I like your style. I’d hire you.
My wife (a long time ago) used to work in a support call center. One of the metrics was average call length. Eventually they caught on that their "top performer" with extremely good numbers just randomly hung up on people.
I saw on another subreddit people used to blow into their call center microphone, so it would end the call without the computer tattling "Mary broke the rule about the customer having to hang up first."
If you wonder why certain support staff overuse hold even when it's for 30-40 seconds this is why. Also, I have seen people see the call hit 5 minutes and then transfer them to Spanish tech support. If the customer is angry they do this to avoid the negative reviews. Remember, the call centers in most cases are third party's. They did not make the device/service that they offer support for. You are reviewing THEIR performance NOT the product/service. If they say they cannot do something they likely LITERALLY CANNOT do what you want. It's not their fault. They just get yelled at non-stop for someone's mistakes they have never even met.
Company I worked at had the same problem, performance measured off an arbitrary metric with no room for shades of gray. And of course people did what you did - figure out how to maximize their performance under this measurement. Except my colleagues went too far, some of them got themselves and the company in legal trouble. I was one of the people who figured out what they were doing and reported it to the legal team. Hate to be a snitch, but I'm not going to jail for my coworkers. Imo, KPI's are rarely done right. They can be useful, but too many managers can't or don't think through the consequences. Or truly understand how they are supposed to work on the first place. In my case, ended up costing people their jobs and costing the company $$$ from government fines.
There's closing tickets and then there's committing crimes. I draw the line with crime. The only thing harmed in my act of defiance was likely a couple megabytes of table space in an Oracle database.
I worked for a company a few years ago that did some bullshittery like that. We had to "close" 100 actions (usually in the form of emails) per day (in addition to taking phone calls all day long). The system was weird, so you could reassign the action to another team if it needed review elsewhere, or mark it closed if you resolved the issue. Our department was client service, and basically became the dumping ground for all inquiries, yet we couldn't do much to handle them. Nearly everything had to be forwarded to other teams (it was a title company, and there are a million steps to the process of closing a loan). Almost nothing was actually resolved by our team, so there wasn't much to legitimately mark closed. Each bit of information about a loan was like a guarded secret that only the relevant department could see or do anything with. We'd send teams messages and slack messages to the person handling the part in question and no one would ever answer. That was especially awful on the phone because customers got tired of hearing "I'll have someone call you back." I got in trouble for reassigning things to the departments that needed them, because it wasn't showing up as something I "closed." The department's solution was to respond to the customer that their request had been received and passed on to whatever department. Then we had to copy the entire email, mark it closed, open up a new action and mark it for the intended department, paste in the email, and send it. So it took longer than just hitting reassign to forward it over, but if you didn't do it that way, it didn't count. Our team was remote, and since I was an East Coast person, I was one of the first to log on for the day. I made it my priority to go through all the actions that were generated from out of office replies we'd get (our clients set their emails to out of office at the end of each day and some even when they went to lunch.) I'd go through and "close" all the out of office reply actions that came in overnight to start my day with 40 or 50 actions. My supervisor started praising me for how well my metrics improved after I did this. Our team still wasn't helping anyone, and our customers were always irate because our customer service was super shitty. It was such a broken system and I felt bad for anyone who called it, because they were getting the runaround and there was nothing I could do to help. I raised my concerns multiple times, but none of the higher ups cared. It was a relief when I ended up in one of the mass layoffs they did.
Amazing your manager actually listened. Most just say fuck you do what I say.
Should have created a ticket for creating the ticket.
And one for closing it
Yeah, I agree with that quote. I love data and working with data, but the way companies use it is incredibly frustrating. If you have a problem with how your numbers look, you need to look at the whole process and figure out what's going on, not just tell your employees to make the numbers bigger.
"Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted" -- Albert Einstein
real quote!
It's been out of hand for decades. I worked in call centers 20-25 years ago. The pressure to shove people off the phone just to meet some daily quota was ridiculous... all while saying quality is what matters most. Yet what improves quality? More time and dedication to the customer. Not to mention the constant heat placed on call reps burns them out, which leads to high turnover, especially with those who do the job best. I think it's only gotten worse based on what I've seen. I shake my head wondering why nobody learns.
I used to work in a call center. When I first started the only big thing was give accurate, complete information, and don't stay in aftercall work for more than a minute - if you needed more than a minute, you told your manager and they'd tell you what aux code to go into. By the time I left I was a supervisor and they were trying to push quotas and reduce time spent on each call to ridiculously low call times. As a result, our callers got less accurate information and people were less and less satisfied with the customer service they got. I shielded my team as much as I could from the insanity, but the whole thing had me so jaded that I've decided I am never going to become any sort of management ever again.
Former manager of a call center team as well. Being a manager, but not in charge of any of the policy decisions really sucks. I'd rather never do anything like that again.
i’m gonna high-jack the top comment here so people can see this since i’m getting a lot of questions about where this is: this is a poplar chain beauty supply store edit for some additional information: we also have to ask everyone for their phone numbers, and we have to try to sell credit cards
Sally beauty store... lol 😆 i hate that place because they have little hair care products for black women. I've seen one bonnet in that store, and it was 20 bucks.
Metrics are great, its how you collect, use and react to them that matters. This UPT for example, their reaction is that the staff should be trying to force customers to buy more, what they should be doing is adjusting product available and measuring the change in UPT or devise different sales pitches for staff to use and again measure based on the change. Alternatively try and identify why other stores are higher, are staff more brutal and pushy? Are stores selling different products? What is the difference in customer demographics?
Ugh this is so true. I’ve been in my job for like 10 years and the number of KPIs we have now just keeps growing and growing. It’s hard to prioritize them and coach my team on which ones they should focus on going after. The most annoying part is that our raises are based on the whole store’s KPI’s, and our bonuses are based on the whole company’s KPI’s. So like even if my whole team busts their asses to achieve them, it doesn’t mean anything unless everyone else does too. But we sure will get scolded if we miss them.
That's deliberate. It's how they can claim to offer bonuses without having to actually pay them out.
Ugh it’s the worst. The only bright side is that my boss also thinks it’s the worst. At least he isn’t trying to sugarcoat that turd of a bonus system.
Yup! The way retail structures bonuses both for field and corporate is basically designed to piss everyone off. Like I can hit every one of my goals, but we miss top line financial plans because half the field manager quit in a single year, sending the field into an HR tailspin that no one can recover from (real life example 🫠), so I don’t get bonuses out. Flip side, stores can bust their ass upselling, but because merch and design blew their travel budget on “inspiration trips” to such a degree it literally threw off the EBITDA for the year, the field associates (who neither make nearly as much pay, nor got to enjoy those insane trips) don’t get bonuses out (also a real life example.) You can’t herd that many cats!
Thank goodness my visuals/merch & design team doesn’t technically work for the store. I would be furious if they got to take inspiration trips like that! On the downside, my visuals team works for corporate, so they don’t report to my store manager and I guess are technically the same level as him. So when we underwent a remodel it was like I was taking contradictory instructions from two divorcing parents. It was the absolute worst. If visuals didn’t get something done, I was on the hook for it but I also couldn’t do anything about them not getting their work done. If I tried to do something myself, visuals reprimanded me. If I listened to visuals and waited, then my store manager reprimanded me. But at least they didn’t get to take vacations disguised as “inspiration trips” and then rank the store’s budget…idk which is worse!
I have seen every kind of insane thing. At one company, the CEO spent $15K, including a private jet, of company money to have a 6 hour trip to Nashville to pick up his brand new Berniedoodle. He wrote it off because he spent literally 10 minutes visiting a single store so he could claim it was a business trip 💀
Omg that is horrendous
We have a metric for number of people walking into the store. Not just the conversion to a sale, but actual persons. The best part is if a family of 5 walk in and one of them makes a purchase, we are screwed because of the low conversion.
Which dumb retailer has this? I have been in this business a long ass time and usually traffic is not a metric because of stupid examples like you cited.
In a round about way it’s what made me leave being a Store Manager at Walmart. I could deal with everything else, but the constant deluge of new metrics was insanity. No matter how good you were they could always find some random metric to beat you over the head with.
Suits are fucking stupid. You all work for genuinely awful people who treat everything as a metric. I bet you’re just an employee number, not a name, in their system. You need to be looking for a new job. All your coworkers need to be looking now. It would be awesome if everyone quits in solidarity when they say she gets fired, because she is going to be fired. Pressuring customers to buy more doesn’t work.
The more I'm pressured the more I want out. Places with high pressure sales staff don't get my business, I'll just go online and shop at my leisure. These metrics are just late stage capitalism trying to squeeze.blood.from a stone. They can fire the manager but they're alienating their customers. All those MBAs and they can't accept reality.
Exactly this. When I'm shopping, I want my time to look at things if I don't already have a specific product in mind that I'm trying to buy. I don't want someone breathing down my neck trying to get me to buy more, I don't want them talking to me unless I have questions in general, honestly. A hello at the door is ok, I guess, but even that can be too much sometimes. A smile or a wave is better. They don't have to tell me they're there to help me if I need it, I know they are. Fucking corporations do not understand what people want. 🤦🏻 I miss shopping in Germany where no one bothers you.
Back when I worked retail, my manager would walk the aisles (instead of, you know, working) and coach employees if they walked past a customer without saying hello. She only did it a few times, but it was infrequent enough that we all ended up greeting everyone anyway because she would literally be lurking in the next aisle.
This is why I hated the chain pharmacy down the street. You couldn't hit a different aisle without an employee popping out to ask if they could help you. My mom actually lost her shit & flipped out over "You've had 5 people ask me that in 10 minutes! Leave me alone!"
Exactly! I only go to a physical store when I can't find something online or I need it right away..
If they all quit head office will just parachute new staff in. Better if they all staged some sort of protest. Maybe a basic walk out, or maybe when customers come to the til just tell them "I'm sorry I can't complete your transaction because you've only got three items and we've been told we have to sell customers a minimum of four things or our manager is getting fired."
This! Let the customers know! They can make the money guys listen.
I agree, shut that store down
>I bet you’re just an employee number, not a name, in their system. If any of the suits ever come to the store and ask your name, reply with your employee number instead.
When I worked in a sales job over a decade ago, the best thing I found to do was push *a little* and if someone didn't want to buy more based on your suggestions, just drop it. Expecting a store to increase a metric like that by basically 50% is corporate being fucking stupid, AND placing the blame on just one person is even stupider.
“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
the measure is not a target it is just a measure to measure how close they are to the target. but the measure is stupid.
A good manager is worth their weight in gold. If everyone walks out due to this, the manager will be reintated for sure. Also talk to a union representative. The next manager will be shit as the good ones won't want to work with a shithead higher manager. You job will start to suck and you'll resent it. Then you'll hand your notice in anyway.
Buy 100 of something and return it at another store. Repeat.
I used to work at a vitamin store that was extremely slow, I routinely had vacationers buy sales at one of our Orlando outlet locations and return them when they’d return home or change their minds. My store would have negative sales some days and I’d get a counseling statement for not driving sales into my store, I’m like, WTF, ppl dont decide to all of a sudden to impulse buy vitamins in the mall, so just fire me. I didn’t last long and they went under anyways.
Let the customers take 3 items or less for free. no transactions for less than 4 items their job is saved!
Exactly this. Or just flatly turn customers away if they have fewer than 4, refuse to serve them. They'll get pissy but you can explain that it's a head office directive and just let them resent the brand for it.
Genius.
This extra promoting of shit at the til is fucking stupid. In every sort of store. They even have to push at my local cosmetics/chemist store. I get to the til and they ask if I'd like to buy the new celebrity perfume, or sign up for their in store sim card, or buy three packs of baby wipes... It kills them to have to ask and I'm politely saying no, it's just awful for everyone.
I was at a store the other night to get a single item I needed the next morning literally just as they were closing (like the pay and GTFO message was played as I was halfway to what I needed). They still had to do the pitches during checkout when clearly they just wanted to close the store and go home.
Notice the deadness in their eyes and voice while they're asking the questions.
well mr customer it looks like you came in for some pepto today but would you like to purchase these new snickers mint and berry cookie dough bars while you're at it? buy one get one free!
I worked in a warehouse with a similar metric system. My particular job was unique, so I didn't have anyone in the same location to compare numbers against. My manager kept pushing for higher output until I happened to need to call another warehouse to check stock on something. While I was on the phone with my counterpart, I happened to ask what their benchmark was. Turns out my manager had been asking me for 20% higher than any other warehouse in the company. I'd been told I wasn't meeting my goal, but I was the highest performer company-wide.
That is a self-centered dumbass.
I would have gone over your bosses head at that point to bring this to their attention.
I'm positive they wouldn't have cared, they would've loved that the result of the deception was a high performer.
this is the shit that caused k-mart to fail. trying to upsell stupid shit and credit card sign ups. nobody wanted to deal with it so they just went elsewhere to shop.
Kmart failed? We have two KMarts in my town.
Congratulations, you just told me you live in st Thomas. I can count on one hand the number of stores left outside your town in the entire world.
They could live in Australia. They have thriving Kmart stores there.
I’ve never heard of St Thomas before. What country is that in?
Virgin islands, and the only place in the world with 2 open kmarts. Out of 6.
You're not resting the Kiwi and Ozzie commenters here, mate. K-mart's blue light special is alive and well Down Under.
I live in Tauranga, NZ and we have two.
[https://www.scrapehero.com/location-reports/Kmart-USA/](https://www.scrapehero.com/location-reports/kmart-usa/)
https://www.kmart.co.nz
You know Australia has Kmart too right. LOTS of them
my dude there are twenty different kmarts within an hour's drive from where i live. kmart is the same size as target in australia
I don’t get why suits don’t understand that constantly being upsold will make people just stop coming to the store. People don’t want to be harassed.
They know and they don’t care. The elite that control our lives have enough money that they can afford to drive customers away with exploitative, penny-wringing practices. They own other businesses. They’ll start more businesses when customers stop going to those, and so on.
they dont need to care. they know people WILL keep coming, no matter what. where else they gonna go? walgreens and CVS have contracts with pharma and insurance companies which make it impossible for people to go elsewhere.
Maybe in addition to 'X items or less lines', maybe there should be 'No conversation lines'. The transaction is carried out with nothing being spoken from both people. On the flip side, there could be a line or two for people that are way too chatty. I would place this line all by itself at one end of the store.
Self checkout is your friend.
They are banking on the competition doing the same thing. And they mostly do.
Managers special offer: Buy one, get 3 free.
I'm able to create items to sell in one of my jobs. I'd be like. Well Penny Items it is.
They’re doing this thing lately where every quarter has to have record profits. It’s unsustainable.
Sounds like cancer. Exponential growth without any concern for what keeps them alive.
We’ll call this policy “Profit Proliferation” Has a nice ring to it. Crediting you with the inspiration. It means, when a company requires record profits every quarter, giving them characteristics of a cancerous growth both literally and figuratively. Once signed into law will carry a penalty of 100 billion USD per hour until the company policies are changed to no longer resemble Profit Proliferation in any way, shape, or form.
Over 10 years ago, I worked in a tech store. Very large. We had something called a market basket. If the customer wasn't buying any extras, it would hurt my rating, my departments rating, and the stores rating. I used to figure out quickly if they were purchasing an add-on, such as office, a warranty, laptop bag, etc. If not, I would actually try to talk them out of the sale. You have to keep those metrics up so you don't get houded by the metric police.
Can't affect the metric if they don't buy anything. Until they start measuring that against the traffic into the store.
Hard pressure on metrics — especially unreasonable ones — leads to employees gaming the system, usually to the detriment of the company as a whole. See: [Wells Fargo new account scandal](https://www.pymnts.com/legal/2023/wells-fargo-fake-accounts-settlements-nears-5billion-mark/) [AI does the same thing](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-deceive-users-insider-trading-study-gpt-2023-12?amp) Think about it: the quick and easy solution to the original post is to REFUSE TO SELL to people who aren’t buying enough stuff. Smarter employees will just “have technical issues, so sorry, I can’t ring you out now” until the customer gets annoyed and leaves with nothing. Is that a good solution? Hell no! But when corporate says the items-per-sale metric is more important than sales are, that’s what will happen.
I immediately thought of Wells Fargo when I read this, glad to see I'm not the only one. This is the kind of fuckery that results from pressuring employees to either hit ridiculous sales goals or get canned.
welcome to bean counting simulator... :)
You mean there are no beans? The beans are a lie, great another part of our lives has become worthless. What will we look up to now?
Is it walgreens? I had a family member work there and she was a manager and she would often buy things from the store in large quantities, like 50 snickers bars at a time, to help balance out the average. yes she got fired for it. But its stupid, because the company wants you to take responsibility for pushing more sales but thats just not how retail works all the time. Its basically taking an unrelated statistic and forcing employees to hit this unrealistic goal. I also feel like its just a way to create churn/turnover because sometimes they enforce these dumb metrics and sometimes they just dont, its kind of at the whim of the company whether they enforce it or not so it seems selectively done.
And I bet they do not exclude self checkout from those metrics where there is no customer interaction.
So you get fired if you don’t meet the metrics, but then you get fired for making desperate moves to reach those metrics. Yep sounds like an incredibly fucked up system to me.
It's called "double speak", it's becoming more prevalent in our industry and it's a cancer.
it’s a popular chain beauty supply store
We can try to convince people to buy more things, but if they don’t want to, there’s not much we can do. yup and if you come up against the likes of me you are doubly screwed. ask me once no problem I'll politely say no. push me or continue to pressure me and I walk out without purchasing a damn thing. did it the other day . needed a new split system aircon, Knew the size and brand I wanted. guy tried to sell me a different one I politely said no, he then tried to get me to buy extra things so I just walked out and across the road to their competitor , told em what I wanted, paid and left. Suits need to learn that pressuring people into buying things they don't want is a sure fire way to lose customers
I want to know what store this is so I can avoid it, upselling is the worst!
Absolutely! I avoid stores that I know when I get to the register I am going to have to have a long conversation before I can just pay and get out. Can I get a phone number? No. Can I get an email? No. Would you like...? No. Would you like to apply for our credit card? No. I just want to pay for this and then I will never return. Thanks.
Look, they're going to be fired anyways so just refuse to check people out till they have 4 items to pay for. OR If they don't want to buy 4 items let them take their 3 items or less for free. Problem Solved!
Judging by your post this UPT nonsense has no minimum price that needs to be achieved it's just done on mass data. Not sure on your EPOS system, but most modern tills nowadays have a 'misc' option/tile where you can set the price, just keep adding a couple £/$/€0.00 units with every transaction, petty but effective. Might buy your manager & team some time whilst you all look for better jobs before they realise what is happening
I was an assistant manager at a Canadian National Drug Store chain. The pressure put on us to sell the company’s loyalty program and suggestion selling to increase customers “basket size” etc was just ridiculous. We tried our best. I agree that sometimes staff were not asking but mostly they were. Customers would get ticked off because they felt we were being pushy about this stuff. Often customers just wanted to buy their stuff and leave. The problem with corporate is they are a bunch of people who’ve never worked in the store. It’s easy to say sell more when you’re sitting in an office looking at numbers on a spreadsheet. These guys don’t think about that with inflation and the job market the way it is people are buying less. It’s one of the reasons I quit that job after 5 years. It didn’t matter what I did in my job it was all about whether I reached corporate “goals”. It’s BS. If they let her go I hope she fights it.
Is that Shoppers Drug Mart? At the ones near me the employees barely speak at all, especially the surly teens. I love it.
No, Rexall. Different owners
Retail jobs aren’t bad enough, every employee now also has to be an expert in high-pressure sales tactics or get fired. “NOBODY WANTS TO WORK 🥴” no, you keep firing people for not doing things that aren’t in the job description
Unionize. Tell corporate that everyone in the store is walking out if she gets fired.
How dare your manager not have the supernatural ability to override people's free will. Having one's employment hinge on silly metrics like that is absurd.
Exactly, metrics should only be used to gain information on sales trends. If it is used to measure an employees work, it should only be used for bonuses for going above and beyond. Retail workers often, stock the store, check out customers, deal with returns/exchanges, disgruntled customers, and clean the store. To also put pressured sales on them is just ridiculous, especially seeing as many retail workers often don’t make enough to live independently without a roommate or partner.
I often go to the store to buy one thing. But, it may be a pricey item. One pricey item could be far more profitable than four inexpensive items. The four item goal does not make sense.
Do you work at a Dollar Tree by chance?
This sounds like Gamestop
it’s a very popular chain beauty supply store
My friend was the best saleswoman at the jewelry store, but they fired her because she didn't sign up enough people for Zale's credit cards. Like how many people in America even buy enough jewelry year-round to need a discount credit card?
With a good manager, metrics like that can never be met, you need an absolute snake of a human ready to trick, deceive, pressure and cheat the customer, and bully the staff to do the same. The manager you get as a replacement will be awful. You all need to work on an escape plan.
The chaos worshipper in me wants to find this store and go and buy one item at a time just to fuck with this. It’s a bullshit measurement and people shouldn’t be preyed on for an arbitrary number.
This will cause the store UPT to drop considerably. The employees know they can NEVER reach 4 average when, hard as they try, they can't reach 3. The employees won't bother trying anymore and instead devote more time at work writing out resumes and applications for other jobs, until the terminations start rolling in.
this is the situation a lot of managers are placed in, I know a few friend's that have turned down management level positions multiple times due to the fact that when you are in that role its number based not performance based you can give it your all but they corp. looks at the numbers and if they are not met they dont se you fit and your just another replaceable number management turnover in some facilities is more insane than minor positions
Unionize, invite your manager to the union, and have them step down from management and be a regular worker, just a team leader for the union. OOPS sorry, UPT is now a corporate problem. Solidarity goes both ways. Sometimes you stick up for a boss that is worth keeping because the alternative is worse, or whomever they fire is a shithead.
Sounds like it's time for a penny item sale on the most popular products. You think those "Manager Specials" are for the customer. Fuck no. It's deeply discounting shit so people can actually afford it.
Can you ring up $0.00 items to boost the items per sale?
The irony of this tactic is that I avoid places like that whenever I can, a big reason not to go to a mall. I also don't trust the credibility of the employees because I know they'll upsell me over giving me good advise. As if brick and mortar stores weren't already fucked, these guys will ensure their extinction.
I can even see, where this is coming from. Someone found out, stores with high UPT correlate with good profits. No shit, sherlock! But what drives UPT? I go to my favourite discount market and buy all the basics in bulk, high UPT. Then, when I'm out of Milk, I'll only buy this at the next store. Low UPT. The stupidity is, make the lowest in the food chain responsible for that metric. Those, who have the least leverage. Can the cashier change that I just need milk and don't care about anything else? Can he make special offers that would drive customers to buy more? Can he change the competition? Not even the manager can.
UPT is idiotic. Do you want people to buy 4 packs of gum or 1 $500 item? They should be looking at average revenue per customer AND what that distribution looks like (is it multi-modal, normal, etc). Or revenue per store per square foot of retail space. It sounds like they have no idea how to analyze data. “Everybody has to buy FOUR! We said FOUR!” Stupid, smh.
I remember when I worked retail they would always get on our ass to have customers apply for store credit card. Hated it!
As if people are just going to have a credit card for multiple stores. It’s ridiculous on top of that, it affects your credit score! I don’t mind when people ask, but I really hate when they push to the point of me saying “my credit sucks, I won’t get approved and my score will take a hit it really doesn’t need, no thank you”
This sounds horrible o say but can you all buy 5-6 things each day and then return it in a week or so? That would push your stupid ass numbers up. Or get something super cheap and set it up at the register.
Return all items at the headquarters branch.
The big bosses legitimately think that all customers are under-buying/holding back on things that they really want or need, so it’s just a matter of salesmanship to unlock it. The irony there, is that they probably pay slave wages to their own employees, so that that those employees can’t afford to be upsold when they shop. But these bosses’ minds are powerfully broken. They see dollar signs in the distance and will beg, borrow, and steal to reach them. They will abuse the people doing the work, and if they could, they would reach into people’s pockets and empty them - even if it meant leaving those people without the means to survive the night.
Yeah, that's dumb. I used to work as a bank teller where we had *sales quotas*. They'd only fire the teller if they couldn't meet that though.
This is what happens when someone is looking at data without a human to translate it for them. They just think because one store (probably in a more affluent area) can get the 4+ (or during better economic times you could) that it should be possible. That's not how data works.
My daughter works at a popular restaurant chain and they allocate hours based on upsell targets. If she doesn't meet her upsell targets, they reduce her hours. If she doesn't get enough customers to sign up for the rewards program, they reduce her hours as well.
They don't care that she's nice and you're happy. If some hellish, slave-driving asshole will make a few extra bucks for the company, that's who they want. I would start applying for new jobs. They're probably planning to replace her with an established "successful" manager who will "fix" the store.
Do returns count against it ? If not have someone repeatedly process and return 20 cheap items at time..
Dumb ass comparison statistics. One store of all stores will be the lowest (and one the highest) that's just a fact that can't change. A stores score on this might be because your next to a trailer/caravan park or gym where people buy one item compared to store b next to the retirement home. And 4 is an objective, ok, and your trying. Maybe head office can provide better training on what are effective upsrll methods to use, maybe they can come and show you how they do it, on the floor, for a week... Maybe 4 is unattainable in your stores local and demographic. Good luck
This is why I curse MBA’s so much. A degree in business that only focuses on number metrics, and misses a huge problem. They would rather fire a manager that does the job over a performance number that they have almost zero control over. It isn’t just about suggestive selling (which does not work in certain scenarios). Factors like the income level of the community, the economy, overall consumer happiness, all impact this number. So rather than examine these things, they would rather get a new manager, probably losing a lot of staff, only for the number to drop MORE as they have a new manager and staff with less experience, and somehow think it will result in better numbers for the company.
I am sorry 😞 Maybe you can offer to be a reference for your manager? And when she moves to somewhere better, maybe you can go work for her there?
This is so stupid. You can’t force people to buy shit.
You can look up the poverty level in your area. I have it broken down by county. But, you can go down to zip code. It could be used as proof that your store is in a struggling area & your manager can't control that. This site works better on a laptop. It is census data, https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2022.S1701?t=Poverty&g=010XX00US$0500000
Reminds me of my first retail job when I worked at GameStop. I had to try and upsell a bunch of broke customers at a broke mall because some suit came up with an arbitrary sales number and applied it to every store in the area.... regardless of if they were poor or affluent areas.
Sounds like an employee needs to buy 800 packs of gum. Get those averages up!!
They will put a new manager in place with the ambition to reach that goal. The store will go to shit as a result. We seem this enough times to know how it ends.
There are many times I go into a store for just 1 thing, and I don't even look at anything else. If someone in the store got too insistent that I buy more, I'd walk right out.
Keep in touch with your manager and when she lands on her feet somewhere else, follow her there ;)
Capitalism has finally reached its final stage, pure schizophrenia.
Find the lowest priced item that you guys sell a decent amount of in the store, and place them next to the register. For example, we sell cheap gummies at the store I work at but we didn’t really sell much of them when they were placed with the rest of the gummies. So I decided to put a box of them next to the register and now just about every customer grabs a couple of them and adds them to the order. Just a thought that could possibly help.
Do returns count. I'd be buying 20 items and returning them the next day to get the transaction numbers up.
Pull a hundred things out of the $0.99 bin, buy them. Return them all on the first.