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?
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.