Expect More. Pay Less™ Target has debuted an initiative designed to ameliorate lagging sales going into the holiday season: force its employees to smile at any customer whom they come within ten feet of.
Furthermore, according to the edict, if the customer gets within four feet, the employee is mandated to make small talk.
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Via Bloomberg (emphasis added):
The Minneapolis-based retailer has a new directive for store employees: If a shopper comes within 10 feet of you, then make sure you smile, make eye contact and greet or wave. If they come closer — within four feet — ask whether they need help or how their day is going, according to new guidance confirmed by Bloomberg News.
The new initiative — dubbed the 10-4 program internally — is among Target’s latest efforts to make its stores more welcoming and reverse its extended streak of weak sales ahead of the all-important holiday season. Incoming Chief Executive Officer Michael Fiddelke has said improving the shopping experience is one of his main priorities.
Target has long encouraged staff to engage with shoppers at its stores, but hadn’t laid out specific rules. Rival Walmart Inc. is famous for its decades-long 10-foot rule that urges employees to make eye contact and say hello to shoppers when they pass by. Other retailers have their own guidance for greeting customers, a balancing act that requires workers to be inviting without overbearing.
I’m not sure human interaction is meant to work this way. Something tells me the smiles are going to be saccharine, and the conversation uncomfortably forced.
Does anyone really want to make small talk, mandated by some corporation, with a perfect stranger while they’re trying to find whatever they came for?
While reading this, it occurred to me: how many mom-and-pop stores on some main street in some small town would ever have to issue a directive to their workers to smile and talk to customers if they come within a certain radius?
They likely wouldn’t, because that behavior would come naturally to their employees, who would likely have some kind of personal connection to most, if not all, of the shoppers who visited the store.
The problem here is, perhaps, one of scale and the psychological inability to conform to it.
When I delivered pizza at a corporate-owned (as opposed to a franchise) Better Ingredients, Better Pizza™ Papa John’s in Topeka, the one at 17th and Washburn, I enjoyed most of my co-workers — the ones I saw and interacted with regularly.
My manager, for instance, was a hilarious, thoroughly decent, and unexpectedly wise reformed meth addict named Calvin, with whom I had many wonderful conversations, just me and him in the store on nights we closed.
While the people I worked with were mostly decent and fine, I was aware during my entire tenure at Papa John’s that we were working for a distant corporate entity that none of us held any meaningful connection to. I may have once or twice met the regional manager, the next step up in the bureaucracy from store manager level. Beyond that, the corporate hierarchy was an impenetrable labyrinth, the machinations of which none of us really understood or had any participation in — or cared about.
Papa John’s — the corporate entity, not the physical store with human workers — was an abstraction.
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Our relationship with the corporate entity listed as PZZA on the Nasdaq persisted only insofar as we were useful tools, making pies on the breadline, driving them here and there, and sweeping the floors.
I’ve brought this psychological theory up before because so often it strikes me as apropos; the New Scientist explains the Dunbar Number (emphasis added):
In monkeys and apes, there is correlation between primate brain size and the size of their social groups, and by extrapolating this relationship we would expect humans to have a natural upper limit to the number of people in their group to about 150…
Historically, it was the average size of English villages. It is also the ideal size for church parishes, and is the size of the basic military unit, the company. Although an individual’s social network may include many more people, 150 contacts marks the cognitive limit on those with whom we can maintain a stable social relationship involving trust and obligation – move beyond 150 and people are mere acquaintances.
