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We hear it over and over. "Good business citizenship" matters to shoppers. They vote with their feet, their wallets, and their hearts, and increasingly choose those retailers who "do the right thing", whether it's how they source product, hire and pay employees, reduce environmental impacts, etc.
Followers of The Retail Owners Institute® know that one of our beliefs is that "Retail is a mirror of society." And independent retailers, especially, are often in the forefront of "good business citizenship".
So, why not let your customers know? As Joe Kefauver wrote in Retailing Today*:
- "Is there a fun way to let people know how many employees at a certain location have gone from entry level to a management position?
- "Can a company creatively communicate how many volunteer hours or non-profit dollars a certain establishment contributed to the community over the past year?
- "How is a given unit and its larger company talking about the use of its culture of opportunity to help leaders in a city solve problems?"
These are the things that independent retailers do day in and day out, without perhaps even realizing how special they are! And especially in today's world, these are your competitive edge!
- Many of you are using social media to promote sales events, new product arrivals, etc.
- You already are finding how to convey your store's personality when it comes to your merchandise.
- Why not also use it to share how you do business? That is what increasingly matters to your customers.
- As a retailer, you likely are one of the civic leaders in your community. It's okay to let people know.
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* "What retailers can learn from Uber's playbook", Guest Viewpoint by Joe Kefauver. Retailing Today, February 3, 2016.
We just read about a high school class of 15 students, plus their teacher, that went into an Apple Store. Each student had a gift card from the school to purchase a MacBook. And, each transaction was to be handled separately.
The employee then discovered that the students were "speaking" to each other in sign language. They were from the nearby school for the deaf.
So, the employee used a laptop on display to exchange brief typed messages with each student, and processed each sale individually, as requested (without the teacher serving as "translator.")
Here's where the story takes an unusual twist.
A couple hours later, the employee went on his lunch break, going to the food court in that mall. And who should he see there?
Yep, the high school class. All talking to each other. Out loud! No sign language!
The students and the teacher spotted the Apple employee, and called him over to their table. It was true that the school was paying for all of them to get MacBooks. But, the students are not deaf.
Seems they were conducting an experiment. They were spending the day at the mall. They had pretended to be deaf, and gone store to store to see how they would be treated.
Their discovery? In their words, almost every store treated them terribly, clearly preferring to be done with these "deaf kids" as soon as possible.
In fact, no other employee in the mall had even grabbed a pencil and paper in an attempt to communicate with them.
Quite the "Mystery Shopper" experience, isn't it?
Might this make an interesting discussion topic for your next staff meeting?
- How should we treat people who "are a little different", as the Apple employee described them?
- And, how should we feel about being part of "an experiment"? Just because we work in a mall, in a store that is open to the public, does that mean retailers should be "fair game" for someone's sociology experiment?
We believe that "Retail is a mirror of society." And this is just one more example.
