I went into a large, nationally-known chain store last night to buy a few things. When I what I wanted I went to the check-out lines. Because the store had too few employees handling too many customers I elected to take my five items to the twelve-items-or-less line, on the assumption that fewer items would mean a faster checkout.
Confirming the wisdom of my choice, the customer two places ahead of me breezed through checkout. Because the three women ahead of me were only buying two items as a group, I felt confident that I would be on my way in short order. (In the fable business, this is known as counting your chickens before they hatch.)
When Employee X rang up the two items, one of the women said that the price on one of the items was higher than the shelf price. After a short discussion about this alleged price discrepancy, Employee Y at the next register chimed in by asking Employee X if the price on a bag of cat food that she’d just rung up was correct, because the customer thought it should be on sale. Employee X thought about this for a moment, then said that it was the larger bag that was on sale. Employee Y then informed the cat-food customer that the matter had been resolved, and continued to check that customer through.
In my aisle, however, Employee X was not able to recall from memory the correct price of the item in dispute. Escalating the issue, Employee X picked up a handset and asked — over the store speaker system — for a price check on the floor. Thirty seconds later Employee X repeated the request. Thirty seconds later, Employee X repeated the request for a third time.
At that point, Employee Z broke away from a gaggle of chatting employees at the returns/customer-service counter and walked over at slothful speed. Employee X and Employee Z talked, examined the item in question, talked again, then Employee Z wandered off into guts of the store, clutching both a scanner and portable handset.
And we waited. And waited. And waited.
Now, as it happens I was also picking up some take-out food. Because I didn’t want the food to be cold I had a clock ticking down in my head. When I finally felt that I needed to be on my way, I waited a bit longer, and a bit longer still. Then I put my five items back in the basket at the foot of the checkout counter and left. (I do apologize that this leaves you in a bit of a narrative lurch. I don’t know if Employee Z ever made it back alive, or who was right about the price.)
On my way to pick up the take-out order I thought about how many procedural steps I’d just witnessed as Employee X tried to resolve a simple price question. Supported by a computer-driven, networked, data-fed cash register, a bar-code scanner, a store-wide intercom, and a roving scout also armed with communications and data-retrieval technology, Employee X could still not discover the actual in-force price of the item in less than ten minutes. (Allowing for a best-case scenario in which management hired more workers, or Employee Z aspired to being more than a foot-dragging slacker, I doubt the whole process could have transpired in under five.)
Despite being outfitted like a retail SWAT team, the Information-Age price check quickly devolved into a Stone-Age price check. Nothing in the cutting-edge check-out system, or the in-store communication system, or any technology of any kind, aided in the real-time price retrieval process.
Why did this happen? Probably because making sure that a check-out clerk can call up a sales price is a low-priority concern, or a high-cost capability, or both. Sale prices are meant to bring customers into a store. Whether those prices actually apply to products at check-out is a peripheral concern. Because few retailers put prices directly on items these days — ostensibly as a labor-saving practice or customer convenience, but more accurately as a means of abstracting price from product (if not actually deceiving the customer) — customers are obligated to track such things themselves. Those customers who do write down the sales price, and pay attention at the register to see if they’re being swindled, then face the additional prospect of watching Employees X, Y and Z launch a time-consuming retail safari if an alleged overcharge of twenty-seven cents is noted.
This incapacity of cutting-edge technology to provide relevant and useful information in real time brings me back to a point I made recently about Google and Network Solutions (my site host):
In the aftermath, the only thing that really surprised me was that neither Google nor my site host could connect me with the abundance of available public information about these widespread attacks. I understand that they can’t do so on a site-by-site basis, but even a simple suggestion that I check for news reports about similar problems would have saved me a bit of aggravation. (Isn’t it amazing that even the most connected tech companies still have routine difficulty integrating themselves into a real-time information flow?)
Which of course also calls to mind the complexity and efficiency of things like a do-not-fly list, which seems to be simple in theory and almost impossible to implement in practice, no matter how many people and how many CPU cycles are dedicated to the problem. Which in turn makes me think about Facebook and the degree to which they can help anyone talk to anyone else about anything at all — including the most banal and trite observations — while they themselves seem completely incapable of communicating the implications of changes to Facebook’s privacy settings to their own users.
The overarching myth of the Iinformation Age is that information has been liberated by technology. It hasn’t. Information is its own shelf item, and it needs stocking and tracking as much as any box. (More so, in fact, because if you lose a box you can always find it later. Lost data is often lost completely.)
Nobody talks about GIGO anymore, but it’s a concept that’s worth revisiting. Not only will your output be garbage if your input is garbage, but if you neglect to input information in the first place you’re pretty much guaranteed a void at the output stage. If you don’t put sales prices into your check-out database, you send your company back to the Stone Age the minute there’s a discrepancy. If you don’t connect your domain customers with real-time information they may spend days trying to solve a problem that you already know is not their fault. If you don’t manage your do-not-fly lists accurately you may end up interrogating nine-year-old, American-born Mustafa al-Suspect from Wisconsin, when the Mustafa al-Suspect you’re really looking for is a 40-ish Yemeni national.
The point here is that the internet is not a magical portal through which we can all become omniscient. The internet is not a great big fountain spewing forth all available information throughout the known universe. It is, rather, a bubbling (and at times caustic) cauldron containing only what people throw into it. Keeping information current and available and relevant takes work. Maybe not ditch-digging, finger-blistering work, but focus and concentration.
Like the sales price of a retail item, information can become obscured and overwhelmed by technology just as easily as it can be discovered or emphasized. For anyone interested in publishing their work or using the internet to get out their own message, the lesson is pretty clear. Do not romanticize the internet, or technology, or information. If you want to be part of the conversation, you have to do the heavy lifting yourself, and manage your content. You cannot leave it up to someone else (including your publisher), you cannot automate the process, and you cannot hope to compete effectively if you leave voids in your content that your customers/readers fall into.
Using technology, like using any tool (think chainsaw if that helps), confers an obligation. There is no way to avoid this obligation that does not involve sacrificing control, accuracy or customer service. If people can’t find what they need, or if you ask them to go back to the Stone Age in order to find the information they’re looking for, they may simply leave.
Update: Thanks to @s_bura for this great link!
— Mark Barrett
Brilliant post Mark, particularly from someone reading this who worked in retailing, logistics and inventory control for many years.
PUT GARBAGE IN – GET GARBAGE OUT
I don’t know whether you are familiar with the term – ‘Computer says no’ – usually bringing a queue in a retail outlet to a standstill for minutes on end. We used to call it ‘computer-induced paralysis’. This is where the till operator hits a key on a computer and it doesn’t result in the expected response. Usually the paralysis is preceded by a serious of repeated and violently executed tapping on the villainous keyboard. After about 15 taps, the executor slumps into the aforementioned state of paralysis.
‘I’ll have to get a manager.’
Usually what then happens is till operator A awakens from the ‘computer-induced paralysis’, leans across to operator B, and involves a perfectly efficient working queue in their untimely debacle.
‘That never happened my till!’ (operator B), who in turn leans across to operator C to seek an answer to why F1 and ENTER did not result in the original required response for operator A. Like a line of dominoes, an entire retail outlet grinds to a standstill, with operator Y saying to operator Z,
‘Hey, Karen, Malcom on TILL 1 wants to know if the first particle in the universe existed before or after the BIG BANG?’
To which operator Z usually answers:
‘Hang on, I’ll pop over to Jason in ‘Bathrooms and Fittings’. I think he has a copy of last year’s manual.’
After about 5 minutes, operator Z returns from ‘Bathrooms and Fittings’, holding the Manual three years old, screaming across 26 rows of tills:
‘It says PARTICLE BEFORE BANG and hit F7 with SHIFT held down should give you F19 – the UNIVERSE, and if you F3 after that, you can ask a manager to do an override on the sale.’
We approach and deal with digitalization in our universe the same way we teach the understanding of different cultures and new languages – with the repetition of old habits and preconceived notions built on ignorance.
Hi Mick,
I don’t know the term, but you did remind me of another event that happened while I was standing in line. Recognizing that there were a lot of people waiting to actually buy things an employee opened up another checkout line. Several people rushed to this new altar, while I dug in. As I was waiting…and waiting…I happened to turn and glance at the just-opened register right as the clerk said, to the woman he was helping, “Your entire order just disappeared.” And he wasn’t kidding.
At the time I couldn’t decide whether I’d gotten lucky, or a plane was about to land on the building.
As to the breakdown caused by a ‘Computer says no’ response, yes, I’ve seen those happen. Suddenly everyone is focused on solving the problem instead of servicing the customer.
Nothing brings everything to a screeching halt these days like a balky computer.
Or a price check. 🙂
Surreal… that I should be here at my day job — retail software multimedia training — expecting to delve into literary and publishing topics on the sly, but instead I am faced with the very issues I’m being paid to think about. Hmm… not sure how I feel about it.
Mick, you know that world precisely. Apparently we share some background. My sympathies.
Anyway, Mark, your very astute comments do leave out the additional issue of training. Not only is technology not the panacea we fantasize about, it is made doubly inefficient by the lack of user training. That lack is caused by the fantasy, because after so much effort and $$ spent on implementing the high-tech system, the expectation is that it damn well better be so intuitive that any rookie user can run it in their sleep! Capabilities exist for excellent EPSS (electronic performance support systems) for just-in-time learning and problem-solving, but no budget has been allocated so it never happens. There is no budget because Management, in its romantic infatuation with the technology itself and all the Information it will divinely provide (read: more profits), has forgotten the front-line employees.
But I rant.
Technology still has, and will always have, one big functional flaw: the human being who uses it. You do a good thing by saying Wake up! Take responsibility! Breathe and focus. Every action should be taken with attention and intention.
You’re quite right. I remember thinking to myself, “Why don’t they have a policy in place about how to keep things moving when something like this happens?”
How hard can it be to code a routine into a cash register that allows you to ‘park’ one customer’s transactions for a few minutes if there’s a need? Maybe a baby throws up, maybe the customer has to run to their car for their wallet — there could be a hundred reasons why you might want this capability.
I think you’re right, too, that people assume technology will all but run itself. I think the people who sell technology solutions often make grandiose claims in this regard, precisely because they know that management doesn’t want to hear about training or training costs. (Technology’s role is primarily to reduce labor costs, and training is a labor cost.)
And, of course, every time a new productivity-improvement innovation comes along, productivity goes DOWN–for weeks if you’re lucky, for months if you aren’t, and sometimes it never comes back at all.
This is because all the little tricks and hacks and workarounds that the employees devised for the old system are now invalid…
It’s worth pointing out that the no-fly list would actually work pretty well, EXCEPT that privacy-fetishist campaigners have made it very difficult for the TSA to compare airline flight information and cross-check it with the list of names. It was a lengthy battle to even get BIRTHDATES on the list–and if it weren’t for the underpants bomber, then we probably wouldn’t even have that!
The only thing worse than a broken system is an _intentionally_ broken system…