THE WAITING LINES OF RETAILING

The Waiting Lines of Retailing

When any smooth and pleasurable drive in an expressway is interrupted by a toll plaza forcing someone to wait in a long queue of vehicles, wasting precious time, it can irritate the person out of his wits. Similarly after a day’s work as one returns home from Nariman Point in Mumbai to board a suburban train at Churchgate if one has to stand in a long queue to have a seat in a share-cab to reach the railway station, it can be awfully painful. Just imagine a customer if he has to stand in a queue at the cash-till for long especially after pleasurable browsing and shopping, he would feel as terrible. In India we have a good deal of patience to wait in such queues. We have been conditioned at a subconscious level to exercise a kind of ‘taming’ endurance. We have waited long enough in queues starting from the first experience of many in the yesteryears to wait in the ration shop queues often or periodically when staples like rice and sugar and home needs like kerosene were rationed under the Indian subsidy system. Trains and buses those days were but a few and inadequate in number as compared to the demand and one had to stand in a serpentine queue to book tickets for any upcountry travel (unlike today’s immense convenience booking such tickets online). Wherever we went we had queues to fall in line with, whether at banks, post-offices or even hospitals. Though we studied the queuing theory in detail, we could not apply it to our everyday walk of life in yesteryears perhaps because of lack of resources.

The scenario in India’s modern retailing currently in some instances is no different. We as customers are forced to wait in queues with patience at many places in our retail stores and malls, as they are crowded invariably and more so in week-ends. Consider the typical scenario of a mall in Mumbai: The multi-point queuing up process begins from the entry point in any mall – once at the point where the vehicle security screening is done, then at the point where the vehicle parking coupon is obtained and once again at the very parking area if one is not lucky enough. As one alights from the car and gets into the mall, there is a queue at the security scanning point at the entrance of the mall. If one has to enter a store in a mall and some bags are carried, they have to be kept in the baggage storage counter in keeping with the store security policy. There one goes once again in the queue even before entering a store. Needless to say, a customer has to wait in the queue again after selecting the merchandise to bill them and pay at the cash counter. At the exit again the baggage stored has to be collected back and if one is not lucky again in a busy day, one may have to wait in a queue again. So, in all, the tally of queuing points in a retail environment, especially in a mall may go up to seven! The long wait nevertheless happens at the cash counters. One may have observed that in any retail store even in a busy day, no queue-busting exercise by the retailer is done and hence customers are subjected to a great deal of hardship. In airports very often we see the security checks at departure having long queues and at the same time we may find a few security and scanning stations remaining closed for some reason or the other pointing to a clear lack of sensitivity to the convenience of passengers. Similarly in retail stores even during busy shopping hours when customer footfalls are at the highest, some cash counters as we may have seen many a time, may not be functional and as a result the number of customers in the queues may keep increasing. This is a common occurrence in hypermarkets in India where the cash-tills may even be more than twenty five in number but the functional ones may be much less at any point in time. Isn’t it time our modern retail stores adopted a few queue-busting techniques? Many retail stores in developed economies as a policy do not allow more than three customers to wait in any queue at the cash-till and the store management personnel spring into action to see that they either guide them to tills where there are less number of people or they use handheld devices to bill the items bought and receive payment to dispense with the customer at the earliest ensuring customer convenience.

Modern retailing is about providing experiential shopping. It is worthwhile to look into all the operational aspects of the retail business to scan for the reasons to understand why queues become longer and find appropriate solutions to remove hurdles for promising greater customer comfort. How can retailers ensure convenient customer entry or checkouts without making them wait in a queue for long?

De-clog Car Entry: A team of valet parking drivers can be engaged by these malls in line with the facility that the star hotels in India offer to its guests, can be provided on busy days. Efficient entry and security check processes with target timelines to dispense every vehicle with clocking the time taken for each car to park can alleviate the problem a great deal. Malls have to provide for a minimum of 6 cars’ parking space for every 1000 square foot of retail space as a standard parking norm to follow. Malls look at the parking facility as a revenue stream and they charge a flat rate of anywhere between Rs 30 on weekdays and Rs 50 on weekends. It takes a lot of time to pass the toll as the parking fee is collected at the entry itself and not at the exit based on time consumed, in many instances and this too clogs the entry line in busy malls in India.

Checkout Cash-tills: Busy retailers who have large customer footprints like supermarkets, hypermarkets and department stores can have special fast checkout cash-tills for five items and below. Retailers also have to readily operate additional tills on busy occasions, having a provision to add temporary tills whenever required. The effective use of self checkout Point of Sale (POS) solutions with electronic payment facility would do the trick to dispel crowds at the cash-tills in future.

Use Dedicated Card Swipes: Many retailers may not have a dedicated Electronic Data Capturing (EDC) machine dedicated for each cash-till in the store. As a result, cashiers may have to depend upon a few swipe machines used in common among a few Point of Sale tills for credit/debit card swipe, which can cause a good deal of delay. A dedicated EDC device ought to be a non-negotiable facility for every cashier’s use.

Ensure Efficient Barcode Scanning: Difficulty in scanning barcodes can cause a tremendous amount of delay especially in supermarkets and hypermarkets. Retailers have to ensure the best quality of barcodes printed on the price ticket where scanning failures should be brought to a naught. When a barcode fails to scan, the cashier is forced to punch in the product code manually and one can imagine how much extra time it will take if two or three barcodes fail to scan while scanning a basket of a hundred items in a supermarket! Ensuring the use of barcodes adopting the universal electronic article numbering system like the GS1 barcode standards on all items sold in the store will go a long way to facilitate easy scanning.

Use Handheld POS: Retailers may use handhelds with connectivity to the Point of Sale. Handheld devices have the capability to raise bills. Some handheld devices have the facility to accept card payments directly as well. The use of such handheld devices especially during busy hours is a respite for many retailers who are keen on ensuring customer delight without letting them wait in a queue for long. Retailers like Woolworth PLC extensively use mobile POS as a technology application and deal with check-out lines on the spot to reduce waiting lines drastically.

Check Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) Tags & Bagging: As the billing process in the cash counter comes to a close in every transaction, the EAS tags in merchandise like apparel and accessories have to be removed, often by the cashier himself. Efficient devices to de-tag merchandise have to be used. Having additional help deputed at every cash-till to remove the EAS tags and to do bagging during peak hours will save a good amount of time for the customer.

Ensure Operational Ease of Schemes and Promotional Offers: Retailers may run many schemes and promotional offers due to which cashiering may become difficult and delays may occur resulting in hold-ups. They ought to ensure ease of operation for the cashier to handle such schemes, offers and coupons/gift vouchers through proper technology support. It may be appropriate to do a dry run beforehand to see how much time it takes in different scenarios for checking out a customer and train cashiers accordingly.

Deploy Service Mission Control: A mission control team may be in place to streamline such processes and organize the act of queue busting in stores and malls that have a large number of footfalls. Such mission control should be a part of the service team taking instantaneous audits to ensure a good customer experience.

Apply the Queuing Theory: The Queuing Theory states that in a situation of a service offered and its customers, the service center can only serve a certain limited number of customers and when a new customer enters to access the service, it is exhausted and the new customer has to wait in a queue until the service facility is available to attend to him/her. Any such service facility has got three elements to it – the population of customers, the service facility and the waiting line. The cash counters in a retail store are limited and the customers are many more who come to the counters and a waiting line is formed. The elements within control – to increase the number of tills, to augment the efficiencies at the tills and to contain the waiting line not to have more than three customers at any point in time, must be understood and examined for corrections to be executed for attaining better efficiencies to save time for all. The application of the queuing theory will help the retailer or the mall management understand the problem areas better to find the best solutions.

Above Everything, Engage Queuing Customers: Psychologists say that customers engaged in any activity of interest while waiting in a queue, will always find the waiting time shorter! Walt Disney asks its guests waiting in a queue to see its comedy shows to text message jokes that could be used in the main event.

A greater sensitivity to customer convenience is required on the part of every modern retailer and proper queue-busting techniques have to be deployed as a temporary or permanent measure to delight customers. Walt Disney is said to have employed about 75 industrial engineers who help the organization with effective queue management at its parks around the word. Customers today are different; the very thought of waiting in a long queue based on a similar experience earlier would not only sicken them, but the very sight of long queues at the tills will discourage them even from entering the store. Gone are the days when we had a resource crunch and today every customer values his/her time and every stakeholder in the service process is aware that the service provider has the resources but only lacks the attitude and the efficiencies to attend to providing customer convenience. If a busy store does not do queue-busting, it may unconsciously be engaged in customer-busting! Queue-busting is after all an art to respond with sensitivity as much as it is a science to experiment and implement the right solutions for ensuring a truly pleasurable experience for customers in our modern retail stores!

DR. Gibson G. Vedamani