I was reminiscing about my first interaction with an American customer I had when I had just started working (I don’t live in America, she was a tourist or something.) I worked in retail, and was taking care of a long line of customers. This American lady was at the end of the line. When she gets to me she asks to see my boss, so I head back and tell my boss a customer wants to talk to him, while I turn to some other work in the back of the store. A few minutes later my boss comes back and says the lady was upset with me and my behaviour, because I had not greeted her as she entered the store (because I was busy helping another customer.) The situation has perplexed me ever since, do all American stores employ greeters? I’m aware of the concept, how big stores like Walmart employ people to stand at the front door and greet people. But is it like that for every store in America?
There are two types.
Greeters are typically someone staged at the door. They typically tend to be elderly, and often during Christmas season and sometimes longer. It serves two functions, being welcoming to customers and being a presence to thwart petty shoplifting. It obviously doesn’t stop someone committed but enough to make some think twice or choose a different exit.
The second type is just your average floor employee. This has become less common over the years with modern systems cutting back hours and shifts during the day. Back in the 90’s in my previous experience, we were expected to great EVERY CUSTOMER with a smile and a few words. Even offer to guide them to what they’re looking for. There were secret shoppers testing or observing and you’re get reprimanded for not doing it. Most customers appreciated the gesture but every once in a while you would experience a power tripping Karen/Ken being awful.
No but there’s usually a cable, electricity, or phone company representative standing by the front door to try and snag you as you come in.
This would be good on !AskUSA@discuss.online if you want to get Americans to answer this question. From my experience, I hadn’t seen American stores with greeters that much, with some exceptions (one of them being Costco).
At Costco, they’re less “greeters” and more “people who check your membership card”. Actually, since Costco switched to automatic card scanners, they’re “people who watch to make sure you scan your card and the machine makes the happy beep”.
That said, at least at my local Costco, they also smile and welcome you into the store – it’s just not their primary function.
Dude we don’t even have greeters at the stores that actually did have greeters in the past anymore. Walmart hasn’t had dedicated greeters in years.
I honestly did not realize Walmart ever had greeters. They’ve always had someone at the entrance/exit. But they just check my receipt to make sure I didn’t shoplift. I didn’t realize anyone acted as greeters there. Is it the same people checking your receipt for shoplifting or no?
Also, in case OP wants to know…most stores do NOT have receipt-checkers at the exit, either. It’s just that Walmart does because it’s a store that is prone to shoplifting.
They used to pride themselves on the fact they hired senior citizens to stand at the entrance and greet people for minimum wage. Personally, I only ever started seeing the reciept checkers in stores other than Costco when self-checkout became a thing. And they do it at a lot of major retailers like Walmart and Target. Not so much things like Dollar General (who doesnt even hire enough staff to actually stock their freaking shelves) or local small shops.
Lmao so I worked at a Dollar Tree for a few months before. Shit was wild. You were expected to check out customers, stock shelves, and put away “go backs” (items that customers didn’t want) on the shelves all concurrently. Because there was never anyone working in the store bahaha
That’s because Dollar General and anything with so much as to have ‘Dollar’ in their store’s name or function like one, expects you to be a swiss-army knife of an employee while still getting shit pay and benefits.
Fun fact, you don’t have to waste your time showing them your receipt. They cannot force you to do that. If you have it and just walk past them, you have nothing to worry about.
It was a thing when I was a kid. They would hire an elderly or mentally handicapped person to stand at the entrance and say hi to everyone. They got good PR for giving a job to someone “in need”. But the real reason was that they found that simply having someone say hi to you when you walk in the door made people feel seen, and therefore, made them less likely to shoplift.
No, that customer is a cunt.
No, the vast majority never did that and now most American Stores barely have enough staff to run the registers.
Lol same here in the UK. If you go into the big supermarket chains like Tesco, Sainsburys and Asda, there are sometimes a whole bunch of registers but only 1 or 2 of them have a human working on them. The rest just sit there as a reminder that human jobs are being replaced by self checkouts.
Even where I work, our company does absolutely anything it can to avoid having to pay people, so we’re often understaffed and overworked.
Tangent over 😅
The most absurd part is the stores haven’t done anything to embrace self checkout. They have not changed the carts to help the checkout process, they have not decreased the number of unused registers, and many of them have not even made the self checkout area bigger.
In the states we have a big box hardware store called Home Depot and they really have done a great job with the self checkout process. I have not been in a single grocery store that has.
I’ve literally never seen one.
More often than not, retail workers behind the counter in smaller stores are required (by their employer) to greet customers as they enter. It’s a tactic to reduce theft. However, employees hate doing it. Most customers understand its a mandatory part of their routine and hate it, or at the least are indifferent. It’s an insincere greeting that nobody cares for, its just something employees have to do, or they get reprimanded.
Your customer encounter is not normal American behavior. Expecting to be greeted is a sign of entitlement (which is the likely case, due to asking for your manager) or possibly mental health.
I had to scroll too far for this. 100% accurate Oka!
Greeters is a jobs program that keeps retirement age people working instead of them having to steal from the stores they work at.
It’s seriously only disabled people or people who should have been allowed o retire already.
It’s mostly just Walmart, and they have been laying off their greeters this year.
Your first paragraph I know is humorous but what keeps them from stealing from stores they’re working at as greeters? Too busy standing around at the front of the store to steal anything?
People usually don’t steal things they can easily pay for.
Not at all. That customer was hunting for something to complain about so they could negotiate freebies from your boss. Sounds like your boss fell for it.
lmao wtf
When I worked at Best Buy, if a customer entered my department I was expected to address them. We were trained to make it seem natural, just a greeting and naturally segway into asking if you can assist. It was to prevent theft but also the chances of closing a sale go up significantly.
My understanding is nobody likes doing it and most customers aren’t big on the pushy sales people.
This is kind of why I like going to Microcenter. They do the “hey, how’s it going” thing, but it’s in a really professional way. And if you tell them you’re just looking they back off and let you stand there for 20 minutes. And if you ask for advice on something, they’ll give you suggestions and detailed explanations about why they think that way.
It seems like Massachusetts Best Buys did not get the memo. I hear all these stories about people hating Best Buy over pushy employees and have the opposite experience. The stores only have 1-2 employees on the floor and the duty of those employees seems to be to hide from customers. If I ever need help finding an item or want something from a locked display, I have to spend 15-20 minutes running around the store trying to catch a ninja.
Admittedly, my BBY experience is… Fuck me… 12+ years ago. Feels like a couple of years ago, but it’s not. I’d imagine employee count has dropped and by proxy, helpers when you need them.
I don’t go in very often, but when I do, I know exactly what I want, and sometimes that item is behind a locked window, and finding someone isn’t easy.
I tried to walk the line with greeting people and then letting them know that I’m around if they need help. I hate salespeople and being one was the worst job of my life. It wasn’t high stress or anything, but having a job where my role was to try and take all of the money from my customer was not something I enjoyed.
I deeply hate going into Best Buy because of this. I don’t blame the greeters because it’s obviously not their decision. But I don’t go in there just for fun to browse around anymore like I used to. I only go in rarely when I can’t get something at a better price anywhere else. If I didn’t hate Amazon more I’d have ditched Best Buy altogether when they started doing this.
Yeah I used to have a circuitous path to enter Best Buy, so I could avoid those people. It just felt like high pressure sales or oppressiveness. Plus where are they when I do actually need a store person. I essentially never need them when entering the store so I wish they’d leave me alone
Home Depot used to be really good at this (not in several years though). They used to have people in each department (not anymore) who knew what they were doing (not anymore) and offered to help (now the few remaining salespeople don’t know anything and actively avoid customers). It used to be so nice that I could freely enter the store, goto wherever I needed but if I was stuck there’d be someone offering to help and who could usually help. I miss that
No, it’s pretty atypical. There’s Walmart (as you mention) and a few others but more often, somebody stationed at an entrance/exit is security, a receipt checker (less common), or a cart-wrangler.
Sounds like you met one of our distressingly many entitled weirdos. Sorry about that.
‘greeters’ are also part of security or ‘loss prevention’, even the old guy who can’t stand-up during his shift and needs to sit on a stool at his post.
Was she expecting
“Welcome to Costco, I love you”?
No, most stores do not have greeters in the United States. You encountered a “Karen”, a rude entitled American woman. There are so many of them in the US now. I used to love my country but every day I despise the bulk of the US population more and more. There are so many uneducated self-important assholes here now.
