by Tazeen Ahmad
One woman gives me her coupons. ‘I’ve spent the amount it says I need to in order to get that money off,’ she tells me assertively.
‘I’m quite sure you have, but I have to check anyway. Just bear with me.’
Painstakingly I go through all £89.34 of her shopping to see if she really does have £6 worth of meat and £4 worth of fruit. It requires a lot of mental arithmetic, which I haven’t done since aged ten, and so it takes a while. She turns to the customer behind her in exasperation. ‘Can you believe that they have to check everything before they can give me my money off?’
‘They don’t in Tesco,’ says the co-customer, ‘it just comes off.’
‘I know! I won’t be doing this again. It’s so humiliating. Never again…this is really quite embarrassing.’
‘You should check the receipt too, because they always get things wrong.’
My least favourite part of this job is being ignored by customers. Second to that is when they talk about me like I’m not there. The stress makes me do my sums wrong so I give up and just put the coupons through. By the time I get to customer number 2 she’s ready to throw a grenade at me. I say hello. She ignores me. I ask her how she is. She mutters a barely audible reply. When I wind up the transaction she stands at the end and methodically checks her bill. I pretend not to notice. She leaves.
Today we have the results of our first MCM in the new financial year, and we have failed. The mystery customer did their rounds in the store, trying to get products located, observing the helpfulness of the shop-floor staff, assessing our dress code and name badges and so on. We fail because the colleague who was approached to find a product did not smile or give a warm greeting, their customer service was minimal and they didn’t offer ‘an individualised, tailored service’. The Cog at the tills apparently did the same thing—no points for the bag, distracted, and offered a basic minimal service—and I can’t help thinking that it was me. There are hand-scribbled management notes all over the report:
‘What happened here? Not a good start!’
‘Any colleagues not carrying out the right behaviours will now be named to the store manager.’ And where that would lead, nobody knows.
When I get back from my break there’s a little sign on my till saying:
‘Make consistency matter.’
Always remember the three service principles.
*Great start…smile!!!!
*Happy to serve…focused friendly tailored service
*Perfect finish…smile!!!
And never forget eye contact.
This is interspersed with lots of smiley faces.
At 5.30, it’s time for Michaela to leave. Betty tells her she has relief but Samantha is ready to send her on her way now. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll deal with Betty,’ she tells a confused-looking Michaela. Samantha stands at the end of her till like a human Closed Checkout sign, frightening the customers away. When it’s my turn Betty closes my till early and I’m out of there on the dot. She also throws in a ‘Bye, darling.’ On my way up the stairs I read the maxims on the wall again: Say goodbye. Say hello—they hardly ever bite. Be friendly. Talk to the customer. Take them to the product not the aisle. Do they want anything else? They pay our wages. Suggest an alternative. Wear your badge.
Saturday, 25 April 2009
Six months ago there were days I couldn’t quite believe that supermarkets were doing as well as reported. Now things are even better—they are bustling round the clock. Customers have also changed in that time. Back then, everyone was feeling flush, now the Basics range is flying off the shelves, people are paying in cash more frequently, they’re taking items off their lists and some are shopping more cautiously.
One customer nips at me constantly. ‘These are all reduced,’ she says, picking up three meat pies I’ve already scanned.
‘I know—that’s how I’ve scanned them.’
She throws her Nectar card down, demanding I check her points. Most annoyingly, she stops at the end of the till to check her bill. As they walk off, I see her turn to look at me repeatedly and whisper to her husband.
Even those not tightening the purse strings are on edge. ‘Would you let me know how many bags you use?’ I ask my next customer.
‘I’ll let you know once I know how many we use,’ he answers acerbically.
‘Well, that’s what I meant,’ I snap right back. No more Ms Nice Cog, I decide.
One customer has caught on to how supermarkets manipulate shoppers into spending more than they intend. ‘I know all about their frequent floor-plan changes and moving products from one shelf to the other and putting the most expensive ones at eye level. I prepare myself for these tricks the minute I walk in here.’ Nonetheless, she ends up spending £30 more than she planned.
A couple with three kids aged seven, five and four tell me they haven’t been to Sainsbury’s for years because they find it cheaper to shop at Tesco and Asda where they spend around £200 a week. They guesstimate their shopping cost at £350 and are pleasantly surprised when I tell them the total is £209. ‘Hmm, we might just come back here again,’ they say.
Others are not so lucky:
WOMAN A. Normal weekly expenditure: £130-£150. Estimate: £165. Actual spend: £181.60. Reaction: Stumped.
WOMAN B. Normal expenditure: £120. Estimate: £135. Actual spend: £170.26. Reaction: Mortified. And then embarrassed bizarre justifying to couple behind.
WOMAN C. Normal expenditure: £130. Estimate: £130. Actual spend: £151.96. Reaction: Self-hate. Followed by shopping thrown into bag angrily.
WOMAN D. Normal expenditure: £90. Estimate: £110. Actual spend: £140. Reaction: Blame. ‘If it weren’t for the clothes placed at the entrance on the way in, I’d save £30 each time. It’s very hard to walk by.’
WOMAN E. Normal expenditure: £125. Estimate: £140. Actual spend: £173.21. Reaction: Grit. She gives me her gift card, from which I redeem £30, her coin star voucher worth £18 and Nectar points totalling £7.50. This brings it all down to a more reasonable £117.71.
WOMAN F. Normal expenditure: £100-£115 Estimate: She tells me to get to £100 and then stop selling her anything. Actual spend: £82.82. Reaction: Relief. ‘It’s still painful, but at least it’s not more than a hundred quid.’
A customer tells me that twenty years ago her mother was able to fill a trolley bursting to full capacity for £50—now the same trolley costs her four times that.
Richard’s old school teacher comes to my till and tells me that he was as lovely a child as he is an adult today. Her own child is torturing her. ‘They need to make supermarkets more child-friendly—I pull my hair out when I bring him in shopping.’
Rebecca is on her usual charm-offensive and as she passes she throws some of her fairy dust over my checkout. ‘You look wonderful,’ she tells the lady I’m serving. ‘That scarf looks stunning. I bet you’re going out tonight,’ she oozes.
‘Oh, thank you. I am, as it happens.’
‘Well, you’ll knock him dead,’ says Rebecca, flashing her a charming smile.
A number of customers tell me today that they haven’t been affected by the recession themselves but they’re making plans for what may lie ahead.
‘We’ve all been talked into it, so I’ve started to make savings where I can.’ This customer uses £10 worth of Nectar points, £50 in cash and the remainder on her credit card to pay the bill of £126. This sort of split payment is typical of a shopper struggling to make ends meet.
I finally meet the customer Sainsbury’s has spent months trying to seduce. ‘I was a devotee of M&S and now I only come here. That’s what the recession has reduced me to. It’s not the same, you know—all that over-priced fair-trade stuff in their classic packaging, the extortionate mixed fruit packs, the biscuits and bread brought in directly from the finest bakeries in the land—all that tosh. Oh, how I will miss it!’ he jokes. He gives me £20 for his £12.70 shop. I give him £7.30 in change.
‘But I gave you £20.’
‘Yes, you did,’ I tell him.
‘I thought it cost £7.30.’
‘No…’ I take the receipt and show him. ‘Your shopping cost £12.70. Your change is £7.30.’
‘Aha,’ he laughs, ‘And if it wasn’t for the recession I wouldn’t even have bothered querying that—I’d just have silently walked away. Now every penny makes me tetchy.’
One customer is truly going back to basics and has started making her own cream liqueur. ‘Is this tiny bottle of rum for a cake you’re making?’
‘No, no.’
‘And I’m presuming it’s not because you’re planning to swig it back on the way home?’
‘No,’ she laughs. ‘We’ve started making our own Baileys. My husband does it with a bit of whisky, rum, condensed milk and cream. It’s as delicious as the real thing and a tenth of the price.’
A blonde with a slim band holding her curly hair back tells me she’s making ruthless cuts. ‘I usually spend at least £400 a month on my shopping, sometimes even up to £600. So now what I do is go around the store with a list and put everything on the list in order of the layout in the shop. Look—’ She shows me her list and she’s grouped all like items together in a number of different sub-lists. ‘Although, it still doesn’t stop the impulse buys.’ Today her shopping costs her £114.45.
I’ve spent the last six months watching the death of the local greengrocer. This seems to be the first pit-stop for consumers after their fruit and veg.
‘Why don’t you just get this fresh from your greengrocer’s?’ I ask one customer who has virtually every variety of fruit and vegetable in the store on the belt.
‘Because I’m lazy and I don’t want to have to stop somewhere else. This is my one-stop shop. It’s a lot easier if you can just get it all in one place, isn’t it?’
A number of my customers want to give me huge packs of bottled water to lift over the till and then scan. And someone tries to give me several heavy boxes of extra-large ready meals. ‘Sorry, could you just put it down at the end of the till and let it come down the belt? If I lift that from this position I’m going to damage my back.’ And when the customer grumbles I actually put the words ‘health’ and ‘safety’ together.
I get my break at 5.20 today, almost five hours after I started and just over an hour before I finish. When I get back I only have half an hour of my shift left.
One of my last customers today is wearing bright blue eye shadow to match her aqua blue top. She works at UBS. ‘They’ve cut 15,000 people there, then another 8000 and now it’ll be another 8500 still to go. So 30 per cent of the workforce is gone.’ She then laughs. ‘It’s so crazy that it’s actually quite funny. So I try not to worry about it because it just drags you down. And if I laugh about it—it doesn’t seem so bad.’
I see Jeremy, one of the Cogs, before I go home and he says: ‘I hear that you’re leaving. Have you had enough?’ He’s caught me off guard and so I mumble something about moving on to other things.
I give Rebecca a lift home for what will be the last time.
‘You know that Katherine’s sad that you’re leaving?’
‘Oh, is she? That’s sweet,’ I say, genuinely touched.
‘She was going on and on about it, and all I could think was—you’ve got friends here other than me? I thought you were supposed to be a Billy-no-mates,’ she teases. As she gets out of my car she leans in through the window. ‘Goodbye, Judas,’ she says with mock-disgust. ‘You betrayed me.’ And then she laughs.
Friday, 1 May 2009
News of the swine flu outbreak is all over the television and Lesley catches me buying antibacterial gel. ‘Not you as well! Customers have been buying loads of that stuff today.’
‘I can see that, look there’s hardly any left on the shelf.’ The entire section has been raided. Hayley offers me my 140th anniversary badge to wear and tells me that the store is intending to celebrate with gusto.
An elderly customer is in early, keen to beat the crowds. She needs help with her packing and is in the mood for a chat. ‘I’d like to shop around but am too old to do it. My sister does it, though. She gets on the bus and goes to Iceland, and then Tesco and Morrisons and then her local grocer’s. I find it exhausting just listening to her. She says she saves a fortune, mind you. I come here because it’s where my daughter shops. She gives me a lift—but it is very expensive to shop here.’
Molly from customer service comes over with the MCM report from last week and tells me she’s going to be spending some of her time on checkouts from next week.
‘Do you like it on checkouts?’
‘No, I absolutely hate it.’ She says, her blue eyes shining angrily.
‘So how come you’re back? Don’t you like customer service?’
She shifts uncomfortably. ‘It’s just the way things have turned out.’
‘It’s hard there, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but I’ve always loved the customer service desk. And not all customers are horrid, it’s just a small percentage. Look…See that lady in pink behind you?’ I turn to look at the customer Grace is serving. ‘She comes in almost every day. She bought a toaster that wasn’t working last month but she didn’t have the receipt and so I had to make a decision about whether to say, “Sorry, can’t do anything—how do I know you haven’t had it for a while and didn’t just take it home and break it?” or decide if it was worth keeping her custom and give her the refund. It took me two seconds to decide. And she left happy and satisfied. So now every time she comes in, she comes over for a chat. She’s like a friend for life.’
‘You sound like you’re really good at customer service.’
A dark cloud passes over her face and she looks upset. ‘Yes…I…love it.’ She won’t tell me why she’s coming back to checkouts except to say that she’s ‘not allowed to talk about it’. I can only conclude that eventually someone upstairs decided she wasn’t cut out for it—even though, it seems to me, she was born to do it. I notice the Cog she was training up a few weeks ago seems to have taken Molly’s place at the desk.
A couple who like cooking Indian food ask for my tips about where to shop for Indian spices.
‘Should we get them in here?’ they whisper.
‘Not unless you want to pay double the price,’ I whisper back.
‘Where do you get yours from?’ And even though it’s extremely unprofessional, I give them the address of my local Indian food store.
A customer spending £85 tells me she ends up throwing away 15 per cent of her shopping every week. ‘I like to have a full larder. And so when I’m down on just a couple of things I pop back in here. And spend more than I need to just to fill the fridge and cupboard up. You’d think my generation would know better, wouldn’t you? What a waste, eh?’
A woman only has £40 on her, she needs another £3.71. She digs around in her pocket for loose change and pulls out a few pennies. She empties her purse on the till in a panic. She then empties her entire bag on the till. It’s so painful to watch that if I was allowed to carry any cash on me I’d have happily paid the difference. She’s about to abandon the entire shop when I suggest she takes something off the list. Red in the face, she leaves her cupcakes, chicken slices and juices. ‘I’ll have to come back in tomorrow for those,’ she says regretfully.
An elderly lady tells me that before Christmas her shopping used to cost her £33 a time and now it is £40.90 for exactly the same food. One man’s shop comes to £68.03. ‘Argh. How did that happen?’ And then, ‘If the wife had come, we would probably have doubled it!’
Samantha catches me yawning and indicates to me to cover my mouth. ‘Are we keeping you up, love?’
Lesley is sitting behind me and teases me about my swine flu panic. Grace, on the other hand, has the same concerns and leans over for a squirt of my gel every four customers she serves.
Katherine’s on her way home with her shopping and comes to my checkout. She looks tired from fretting about her sick uncle. ‘Yo
u need to stop and rest, woman.’ I say, noticing that she is not wearing her trademark crimson lipstick and blue mascara.
‘No, no rest for the wicked. I’m doing some painting and gardening tomorrow.’
Two minutes before the end of my shift and I grab the bull by its horns. I tell an approaching customer than I’m closing after the one I’m currently serving. He takes his trolley to another Cog. She says the same. He bellows at the top of his voice, ‘YOU’RE ALL BLOODY CLOSING! WHO THE F***’S GOING TO STAY OPEN TO SERVE US?’ He does this right in front of the till captains. Then, one of my regular customers comes to my till, two minutes after my shift has ended and I’m still serving the previous shopper.
‘I’m really sorry, but I’m closing after this customer,’ I tell her. The customer I’m serving is still emptying her trolley.
‘But…but…I have my son with me,’ she says. Ai-li passes by and I ask her to get me a closing sign. ‘I’ll get you one, but you’ve got to serve this customer anyway.’ I’m not sure she has the authority to tell me this, but the regular starts to load her shopping on. A junior supervisor comes to my till.
‘Ayesha says you’ve got relief tonight. She also says you can’t close your till until she SAYS so.’
After my relief arrives, I cash up and get ready to leave, but one of Grace’s customers wants something from me. ‘Can you get me something to wrap this mirror in?’ We don’t sell extra wrapping here so what she wants I cannot provide. In any case,
I. Have. Finished. ‘I’m on my way home now, I’m afraid,’ I dare to say for the first time since I’ve worked here.
‘Well, I can’t take it like this—it’s ridiculous. Can’t you get me something?’ I look at her with my most convincing customer service face. ‘If you pop to the desk at the front of the store I’m sure they will find you something.’ I wink at a grinning Grace and whisper, ‘Watch and learn,’ in her ear as I walk away.