As Shopping Heats Up, Sometimes So Do Tempers

Gloria Thomas felt the holiday cheer begin to fade while shopping the Kay-Bee toy store at Lakewood Center.

She bit her tongue as an employee put her question about a Little Mermaid toy on hold to chat with another worker. And she did a slow boil when the register line stalled as the cashier answered what turned into a frustratingly long telephone call.

“That was just plain inexperience and rudeness,” Thomas huffed.

Call it aisle angst, an in-store version of road rage. As shoppers gird today for the busiest shopping day of the holiday season--it’s almost always the Saturday before Christmas--stores are trying to cope with heightened demands for customer service and a shortage of qualified help.

And for every weary shopper with a tale of woe there’s a salesperson to counter with an equally compelling war story.

There are easygoing souls like the guy wandering through the massive Target store in Irvine last weekend, smiling a greeting at passersby: “Has anyone here seen my wife? I seem to have lost her.”

But grace is a scarce commodity among shoppers who have already battled freeway snarls, lost the last close-in parking spot to a sharper-eyed motorist and grudgingly acknowledged that the holiday budget once again is a bust.

Consider the couple that approached marital meltdown last weekend at a Toys R Us in Tustin Marketplace. Mom inadvertently set Dad off by pulling an order ticket for a bike that had caught their son’s eye.

“So what will you do if he sits in a car?” Dad taunted. “You going to buy him that too? Give me a break.”

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Retailers are trying to defuse potential explosions by bolstering training, wages and communication between managers and employees. But the do-or-die nature of last-minute holiday shopping all too often ruptures the delicate relationship between harried consumers and overworked salespeople.

“You have hordes of amateur shoppers out there who don’t really know what they want, and temporary part-time salespeople who don’t know very much about the products,” said Ron Zemke, a Minneapolis consultant. “For both sides, the rule seems to be the less contact, the better.”

The plethora of gifts alone is enough to befuddle shoppers.

Bill Damico, a retiree from Irvine, and his wife, Helen, thought they had this year’s holiday shopping nailed. Armed with “wish lists” augmented by pictures clipped from store catalogs, the Damicos got surprisingly quick and accurate service when they approached Toys R Us salespeople for assistance.

But the array of toys proved to be staggering: “What’s a Talk Girl Deluxe?” the retiree muttered. “Is it a doll? I guess it’s got to be a doll. . . . Where do they keep them?”

After two hours of navigating aisles clogged with crying children, shopping carts and piles of merchandise, Damico raised a white flag.

“You find the truck [a grandchild] wants, but it uses four batteries that will only last a couple of hours,” Damico said. “So then you have to find a battery recharger. And then Sav-On has batteries cheaper, so you have to go there. It all takes so much time.”

The economy is proving to be something of Scrooge this holiday season where customer service is concerned.

Retailers rely upon an influx of experienced salespeople laid off late in the year by home-products stores. But with many consumers asking Santa for a new deck or bathroom, seasonal layoffs by chains like Home Depot have slowed.

A strong economy means fewer experienced people are available to fill 500,000 seasonal retail slots. Those hired are given little training and little incentive to go the extra mile for customers. “Some of these kids are obviously better equipped to be working in a rock band,” one retail industry executive said with a sigh.

The stage is set for frustration--on both sides of the cash register.

Sandra Wallick reached her breaking point when she finally found two pedal-powered toys for her sons. A department manager refused to sell them because they were floor models.

“What’s really frustrating is that they’ve sold floor models to me in the past,” Wallick said. “This was a case of a manager who made a decision for no good reason. I hate it when people are inflexible.”

Consumers rank customer service as important as good prices, and they are increasingly unwilling to sacrifice one for the other.

More than half of those responding to a recent survey by Yankelovich Partners, a Connecticut-based polling firm, said price was the driving factor. Yet 59% of respondents also said they demand solid service.

“People are trying to avoid the need to compromise in their lives,” said J. Walker Smith, managing partner at Yankelovich. “Compromise is a common experience in shopping . . . particularly the stores we describe as the ‘muddle in the middle.’ ”

So department stores that want to survive, experts say, must ratchet up service, especially during the critical holiday shopping season.

“The competition is so intense that if you don’t like the service at one store, you go across the street to another, because you know that they have the exact same merchandise,” said Kurt Barnard, founder of Barnard’s Retail Consulting Group.

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Although stores agree that customer service is critical, they say the nation’s myriad demographic groups defy a one-size-fits-all solution.

Most chains target the predominant shopper--the time-stressed mother with children in tow. But age and income play noticeable roles in how shoppers define service.

Retirees who cut their shopping teeth decades ago at elegant but now-defunct department stores complain that service falls short of what they recall from a gentler era. But their offspring--particularly yuppies with two incomes and children--”want quick, fast, convenient service,” said Bruce Van Kleeck, vice president of the National Retail Federation in Washington, D.C.

And retailers are still plotting strategies for Generation X shoppers “whose philosophy seems to make them more into saving and less into material things,” Van Kleeck said.

Then there’s the annual influx of Santa’s helpless. Men buy less than 20% of what is sold each year, but they are out in force during the holidays.

“Most guys are not good shoppers,” consultant Zemke said. “They don’t have a plan, they don’t know what they’re looking for, and they depend an awful lot on sales associates.”

Pity the sales associate who waits on Jill and Kelby Van Patten, a Tustin couple.

Said Kelby: “Jill likes it when a dozen salespeople are hovering all around her.” Said Jill: “He likes to shop alone.”

Salespeople say experience is the only teacher when it comes to fathoming an individual shopper’s wants.

“You don’t want to invade their territory,” said a department store salesman. “Sometimes they’ll be hostile to you at the beginning. But if you can let them see [that] you want to take care of their needs, it usually works out.”

Some customers are impossible to please.

A shoe salesman at a Brea Mall department store was wide-eyed while describing the temper tantrum thrown by a woman after the store refused to issue a refund for a pair of shoes that obviously were well-worn.

“She was screaming and cussing and knocking over displays--all of this with her 13-year-old daughter standing right there,” the salesman said. “I could sympathize with her anger, but I was embarrassed for her behavior.”

Sometimes the steady demands from customers wear salespeople down.

When an employee at the Bristol Farms store in South Pasadena recently complained about the constantly ringing telephone, a supervisor cautioned her to “Remember: happy voices, happy voices.”

Salespeople are the retail industry’s single largest cost after merchandise and buildings. And when retailers need to cut costs--as they did during the early 1990s--they “went after sales, because that’s where the meat is,” said Van Kleeck of the National Retail Federation.

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Operators who are being pressured to bolster profits won’t be adding to year-round staffing levels. And they’re not likely to boost hourly wages that now range from $8 to $11 for full-time retail employees--and much less for part-timers.

So retailers are turning to technology and innovative scheduling that could free salespeople to concentrate on making sales.

Target stockroom workers carry cellular phones and radios to cut the time customers spend waiting for dreaded price checks. Sears, Roebuck & Co. uses behind-the-scenes teams to stock shelves and affix stickers that alert employees and customers when an item is out of stock.

Sears also dispatches mobile cash register teams to busy departments, and store managers throughout the industry are expected to stay on the front lines to serve customers.

Shannon Buscho, vice president of Mervyn’s of California, credits new scheduling software with improving the chain’s efficiency by 20% over the last holiday selling season.

Chains also have formalized what longtime shoppers say they remember as common courtesies.

Sears calls its strategy PSE--the pure selling environment. At Macy’s, sales are guided by the “four on the floor” program: greet customers in 30 seconds, suggest what’s on sale, ask them to open a charge and thank the customer by name.

Industry veterans like Nancy Meraz, human resources manager for 17 Sears stores in Orange and Los Angeles counties, say the policies are a necessity.

“When I started in merchandising 23 years ago, customer service was largely lip service,” she said. “Now it’s a matter of survival.”

Customers do notice when service changes for the better.

“Mervyn’s never had enough people, and the ones they had were inexperienced,” said Thomas, who voiced frustration with her Kay-Bee experience. “Now they treat you with respect. They call you by name. You feel like they want you to be there.”

Long Beach resident Patti Schiffner, 40, wonders if a society that doesn’t seem to worry anymore about niceties like holiday spirit will strangle what customer service remains.

“Too many salespeople lack what’s no more than common courtesy,” Schiffner said recently while watching her daughter, Stephanie, play peek-a-boo with Lakewood Center’s Santa Claus. “That’s probably why so many salespeople act like it’s a burden to wait on you.”