When all I’m trying to do is go to the store, get my stuff, a few gifts, pay a fair price and get out, why does everything about shopping seem to be a conspiracy?
The retail experience is like a shell game on a massive bass ackwards, overproduced scale, making shopping a gambler’s paradise. There is nothing fair about supply and demand except laissez-faire. Also, I have yet to find a single free market in this economy not even between fish and fruit.
I’m convinced stores rearrange products frequently to make customers focus on the hunt rather than how much. You can’t find items or the employees who hid them. This is known as merchandising; but for humans weaned on consumption, it’s antagonizing. Go color code the floor or something.
Newsflash to retailers: Shoppers move items all over because you do. Parents lose children in stores because shopping requires so much concentration and retaliation. Do you think all those clean ups are accidents? It’s to coax your child labor out of hiding.
If it’s all about the endcaps just make the entire store a bunch of square pods with an endcap on each side. Aisles of endcaps and one big dizzying square dance.
All these pricing schemes seem unnecessary. If you’re trying to trick or depress customers, just state prices using minimum wage work hours and quote quantities in handfuls. By the way, please limit my options to five or less per product. When I automatically go into “Eenie Meenie Minie” mode using fingers and toes, it’s embarrassing.
“Give me more at the store” is the newest customer movement and mantra. Here’s the customer service we want:
- Unlock both doors to prevent the double door dilemma, eliminate the bounce back effect and reduce our need to sue.
- Carts with something other than luggage or stagecoach wheels.
- Carts that can be size adjusted depending on how much I’m buying or to match my mood. (See Hasbro’s transformer technology.)
- Carts with heel guards, car avoidance systems and that can find their own way back home.
- Free carwashes while we roam and free shoe shines, manicures, pedicures, massages, mimes, magicians…while customers wait in congestion at check out.
- Check out lines with big screen TV’s, cable, couches, hors d’oeuvre...Dinner and a thirty minute movie at checkout would make the wait worthwhile and make me shop more.
- These services will fit into the same space occupied by the twenty closed check out lines.
- Lastly, we will continue to mail-in for rebates only if you will bill us for the purchase, include a copy of the receipt, mail it to the bill payment fulfillment center “BPFC” nearest my zip code and not expect payment until we get our rebate checks. Contact the BPFC if you don’t get paid within 8 to 12 weeks after we receive our rebates. Sounds criminally insane doesn’t it?
Note to retailers: Aldi solved two cart problems for a quarter. Common sense and creativity doesn’t cost much unless they’re overridden by greed. (See Daffy Duck syndrome).
I’ve concluded, shopping is not simply linked to depression, it’s the reason for depression. Going shopping must also be the precursor to going postal and can probably be linked to all craziness and all crime. The conspiracy goes deeper still…
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conspiracy, customer service, depression, satire, shopping
