The impact of changing shift times in WFM

I just told a group of retailers at RedPrairie's user conference that you can't under-estimate the impact of changing shift times on retail front-line workers. And while I wholeheartedly believe it, I think having said it, it still gets under-estimated. Here's the thing: It's been a long time since I've had an hourly job. And I'm guessing that it's been a long time since you had an hourly job too. My job hours haven't changed in 15 years.

But I just recently got a taste of what it feels like when your start time changes on you. My children's school is changing its start time from 8:30am to 9am. Not that much of a change, right? Well...as someone who works from home, that's a big change. That means another half hour of my children at home during prime meeting times. It means a later day pickup, which means more coordination between that, dinner, afternoon activities and even homework time.

Now, play a very small fiddle for my woes. The school is changing its hours because my school district is facing a huge budget crunch and they have decided one of the ways to address their shortfall will be by co-bussing middle school and high school students. Whether that is a good idea or not is a whole 'nother discussion, but it means that the middle school and the high school have to start their day closer together, and in order to accommodate, the elementary school times are being pushed back. That's all reasonable. Makes sense.

What didn't make sense was how they communicated it. I have a child already attending the elementary school, and another starting Kindergarten this summer. I found out about the time change through my Kindie's enrollment confirmation. I have yet to hear it officially for my older child. For a change that impacts my childcare arrangements, my business, my family's whole schedule - the communication has been remarkably blasé, and mostly through indirect channels.

So, I think some of the challenge in implementing workforce management, and some of the resistance that retailers are encountering has as much to do with people who have forgotten what it's like to work an hourly job - our jobs' hours don't change, whether we work way more than we should or way less. But having experienced the movement of a major item that my family schedules our lives around, I can say that the disruption to employees' lives should not be under-estimated. That's not to say you can't get away with the changes. But you do need to be far more sensitive to both the message and the advance warning of that message that you give.

People will accept almost any change - as long as you can sell them on the need and acknowledge the degree of disruption you're introducing into their lives.

The Coolest RFID Tag Ever

OK, that may be a bit over the top, but Ed Holcomb from VRF Holdings sent me an ePaper hang tag, and I have to say, it looks really good. Mine doesn't have the antenna in it, but the whole shebang is real, and it takes your average RFID handheld reader to get it going.

Price changes at the shelf are the last manual step in a pricing process that is increasingly sophisticated. It's problematic enough for grocery, with promotional price changes that run in the hundreds every week, but as I can personally attest with my near-bouts of carpal tunnel after pricing entire racks of apparel for markdown, it's at least as bad, if not worse for apparel.

If the industry is going to get smarter about pricing, we're going to need to get smarter about our price tags. This is a pretty cool step in the right direction.

You Can Too Use Loyalty Card Info to Help Consumers

I just got an automated phone call from Costco, alerting me to the fact that the Detour energy bars in my cupboard have been impacted by the peanut recall/salmonella alert. We had actually already scoured our pantry for peanut things, but for some reason it just didn't compute that those bars might be impacted - we were looking mostly for kid snacks with peanut butter in them.

Not only was it great that Costco actually used my purchase history to do something useful for me, but they did it literally just in time - I called my husband to let him know, and he had one of those bars in his briefcase. Costco even gave me the website info I needed to get replacements from Detour (since those things are pretty pricey).

So, don't tell me you can't do useful things for consumers with the information you collect on them. Do you know how much I appreciate Costco right now? That call was worth at least another year on the membership...

I like Michael Arrington

Yeah, I haven't been writing on here for nearly forever. We'll get back to that later.

In the meantime, I saw this post by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, and since the comments are closed, I thought I'd get my say right here.

It really made me sad. People talk about a decline in civility, and we've seen it in politics. I've seen a few comments about my work that have made me lose a few nights sleep, and I don't flatter myself that I have anything near the reach that Michael has. But even so, it's amazing, in a very bad way, that these kinds of things can happen.

I just want to say, I love TechCrunch. I try to model certain elements of our business after TechCrunch's model, and I firmly agree with several of the trends that Michael and his colleagues have written about - particularly as they pertain to my own content business.

It's so very hard to put up the good fight and defend what you believe in when it's your family at stake. I can't bring myself to say "don't let them win!" when I don't know that I could put my own family at risk for the same thing. As Michael says in his post, it's just a writer expressing an opinion. About technology, for heaven's sake, not life and death.

Chill, people!

And Michael, you've never met me, probably never will. But heartfelt wishes. I really admire what you've done. Keep in mind, for every negative comment or person out there, there are 10 positives that never made the effort to show it. I've definitely been one of those.

Web Developments Retailers Should Watch

TechCrunch released its agenda last week for the TechCrunch50, which starts today. They have helpfully grouped the companies into categories, which they will run through over the next couple of days. The companies are all fascinating, and I encourage you to check them all out. But what was really interesting to me was the categories themselves:

• Youth and Culture - basically a bunch of social networking sites that are targeted at the younger crowd. If they succeed, they will bring together a juicy group of targets for retailers and marketers. But brands will have to be careful how they approach these sites - if you think there was an uproar over Beacon, think about the privacy implications of advertising or diving in to sites that cater to tweens. That's going to be laden with a lot more landmines.
• Memes and News - the theme here is filtering or aggregating content in some way or another so that it's easier for people to wade through - either by creating a niche of some kind ("news about your friends instead of news by your friends"), or using the crowd to surface the most popular stories from within a world of "TMI". Product reviews kind of do the same thing, but ultimately I can see this kind of functionality melding in with another category - "Vertical Social Networks" - one of which creates a social network around shopping and fashion.
• Finance and Statistics - a bunch of sites that put analytics around either information on the web that relates to people or topics, or information specifically about a person or topic. For retailers, this could be turned inward to employees (especially frontline employees where it's hard to really do a thorough check on the person before you hire them), or turned outward as a service to customers. Safeway's FoodFlex program is a good example based on "closed" data (Safeway's clubcard purchases - Safeway offers to analyze the nutritional value of your past purchases and recommend ways to create a healthier diet), but as more of people's lives end up captured online, someone's going to think of a way to take advantage of it - including purchase or shopping/browsing history.
  

Also interesting to me was that the list of commerce-based topics and companies weren't really that interesting. The session on Advertising & Commerce Monetization had companies that create new ways of targeting (or ways to avoid getting targeted). The most interesting of that lot was Adgregate Markets, which promises to "turn banner ads into shop ads", basically by turning a banner ad into a widget that gets you closer to purchase from the first click.

Retailers have never been keen to be on the cutting edge of technology adoption. It's one of RSR's fundamental "Paradoxes of Retail" that retailers must manage a heavy load of legacy technology infrastructure at the center of their business while consumers are adopting technology at an unprecedented rate - and forcing retailers to speed up or be left behind. The TechCrunch50, to me, shows that the pace of change isn't letting up at all.

How Will Consumers Respond to Suddenly Targeted Ads?

This week, RetailWire posted a story on Infosys' new "ShopperTrip360" for comment, and got back a lot of negative comments (myself included, I guess). You can read the description on RetailWire for what it is and what it does (registration is required). But the topic got me thinking, because a lot of the negative reaction came from people worried about privacy and consumer reaction to an invasion of privacy. Someone commented to me that if people only knew how much data is collected about them already, they would probably freak out about it - let alone the degree of tracking that the ShopperTrip360 proposes.

But the thing is, no one really does anything with the data - so no one REALLY notices how much data is collected. So what would happen if retailers really started earnestly using the masses of information they collect about consumers? For example, I get coupons in the mail from Target. For a long time, I just tossed them. 90% of what was in there didn't appeal to me. Then all of a sudden I got a coupon book that I thought was just great - about 2/3 of the offers were for things I buy. I was pleased - "They're paying attention to me!" I thought. But I also realized that it probably meant that Target was actually mining my purchase history to determine what offers to send me.

That's not too disturbing. Anyone who doesn't realize that this is what that loyalty card is really for is only fooling themselves. But if retailers started acting on data that customers didn't really realize they were collecting. If, for example, Target suddenly started sending me offers based on my online browsing history, the suddenness of that relevance might come off as creepy.

Am I really going anywhere with this? Only to say that despite an overwhelming desire to get more relevant with consumers, it probably doesn't hurt that we seem to be moving at incremental speed. Moving from mass to 1:1 overnight would probably just scare everyone away.

Cart Observations

A Canadian newspaper ran an article on smart shopping carts titled "High Tech Shopping: Smart carts assist in purchases but raise surveillance concerns". I hate these kinds of articles, where they trot out Krazy Katherine Albrecht to spout some paranoia about all the insidious ways that retailers and technology companies are conspiring to tag you and track you. It's almost irresponsible reporting.

This is a stronger stance than I usually take on the topic, but I just completed a new survey on customer data and loyalty programs, and when I compare reality to Albrecht's fantasies, the gap is planetary (as in, she must be living on a different planet). The standout statistic from the CRM report? Barely 20% of retailers who took our survey (out of a total of 90 respondents) strongly agree that they know who their best shoppers are - let alone any of them at all. And retailers are less concerned about collecting more microscopic details about their consumers than they are with getting any kind of insights from the data they already have. (By the way, the study results will be available on RSR's homepage Wednesday morning.)

But I take issue with several other fundamental concepts that came up in the article. First of all, retailers don't have to offer shopping carts. A shopping cart is not one of our "inalienable rights" as consumers. Retailers offer them as a service, and believe me, after looking at what putting a small computer on top of a shopping cart can do to a cart (like knock them over in the wind, bending the frame), or all the ways that companies have come up with to try to corral carts, or all the door dings on my car from carts - they are pretty close to being more trouble than they're worth. If a retailer uses a tracking device of any sort on a shopping cart, they should absolutely disclose it, but if you don't like it, then don't use the cart.

Second of all, retail stores are only semi-public spaces. They're not like the park down the street. They are owned and operated by a company. Again, the retailer should disclose how and where they track consumers in stores (if you're sniffing cell phones and using triangulation to track location and you're not being up front about it, you deserve all the wrath that people like Albrecht can bring on you).

But if consumers don't like what the retailer is doing, they can take their purchases elsewhere. If the market for anonymous shopping gets big enough, then there will be some kind of entreprenuerial retailer who steps up to fill the need. Because for the most part, consumers seem more than willing to trade some personal information if it gets them better deals and relevant offers. I'm sure there's a study out there somewhere that supports it, but even if there isn't, the continued persistance of club cards and loyalty programs is evidence enough. If consumers didn't like them on at least some level, they wouldn't sign up for them.