Sounding Board: Small Steps to Success

By creating a more pleasant and productive shopping experience, retailers can boost sales and profits. Remember the 1980s? The heady days of runaway inflation, a deep recession, the rise of the Yuppie, Reaganomics, the emergence of cable TV, the fall of the Berlin Wall, boom boxes, junk bonds and the Rubik’s Cube—so much for the good old days. However, it was also a time of self-analysis by many American companies that were looking for new ideas and more efficient avenues of growth. For some, the answer was an unbridled but brief love affair with Japanese management principles and policies like quality control circles, consensus management, TQM, JIT, and the ever-popular concept of the Keiretsu—companies with interlocking business relationships that exerted power over entire industries—a concept which would have the FTC, SEC and other government acronyms making reservations for you at Club Fed. The subject came up in a conversation I had with someone at the annual Blount Culinary Summit. Basically, anything the Japanese did was immediately elevated to the corporate hall of fame and gave birth to a new generation of consultants—most of whom never ventured beyond Vegas and whose knowledge of anything Japanese rarely extended beyond sushi and sake. While some of these practices have faded from the business lexicon, others are still around and present some valuable lessons for retailers. One that came up recently is “Kaizen.” It is not as much about policy as it is developing a culture that encourages continuous improvement in employees, products and the business in general. Kaizen, which translates to “good change,” is not about making giant, costly leaps forward in technology, processes or employee relations. It is about taking small steps everyday to improve every aspect of the business. Its basic tenet is that it is a bad idea to do things the way they have always been done in the past and that everything can and should be done better—a simple concept that might have once saved A&P. Forgive the overused and slightly trite expression, but it is not rocket science. It is fine that academicians and consultants can lay out the exact steps needed to achieve proficiency in a total business concept like Kaizen. That is particularly useful in complex manufacturing operations. Frankly, Kaizen has not exactly been a magic bullet for some long-time practitioners like Takata Corp. whose defective airbags are the subject of the biggest recall in automotive history, or Toyota’s lagging fortunes in the U.S. car market. But this concept, like any other, fails when an organization does not fully commit to making it an integral part of their strategy or expect massive changes and improvements overnight. Looking at things logically, I can think of plenty of small steps that can be done to boost sales and profits and improve store operations every day by simply creating a more pleasant and productive shopping experience: • Avoid packing out during peak periods and clogging the aisles with hand trucks and empty cartons. • Do not run out of plastic bags in the produce and meat departments. • Replace empty or nearly empty hot trays in the foodservice department. Nothing is less appetizing then something that looks like old leftover food. • Focus on labor scheduling to avoid lines at the checkouts and, if necessary, have managers fill in as checkers or even baggers during crunch times. • Fresh is the price of entry. Do not hide poor produce by burying it on the bottom of the bin or by cutting away sections that have gone bad until there is nothing left. You are not fooling anyone. • Make sure your website is up-to-date on product information and pricing, and have a regular presence on social media so you know what people are saying about you. • Hire people that will make the best ambassadors for the store, not those that act like they are doing the customer a favor by waiting on them. • Acknowledge staffers when they do a good job and do not just berate them when they misstep. • And, unless it is an emergency, keep in-store personnel off their cell phones. Could not be simpler, right? So simple, they seem ludicrous to mention—maybe. Can you add anything to the list? Len Lewis is a regular Grocery Headquarters columnist and veteran industry journalist.