As a New Yorker, I face long queues with a sigh of hardened resignation. I do not question the absurdity of the experience. Instead, I foolishly consider it a sign of endurance, even if getting a Covid-19 test lately means staying outdoors at 27 degrees for an hour. Recently, while I was in the long line of Starbucks, my patience ran out. It dawned on me that this wait was the result of my persistent preference to buy coffee the old-fashioned way – that there was in fact an escape from this humiliating cycle. I can just place a mobile order and pick it up at the store without waiting in line.
This kind of frictionless comfort is wildly appealing and looks everywhere now; this is especially true in transaction spaces, whether it’s Starbucks, the local grocery store or the airport. But there is a compromise to reset our expectations, and it is emerging a lot. Customers these days feel so empowered – and angry. People are more angry, more angry and more prone to throw childish tantrums in front of service staff, as described in detail in a recent A New York Times article entitled “A Waiting Nation Wants to Talk to a Manager.” It does not help that we have been in a pandemic for two years, which burst the bubble of the country’s abundance (read: supply chain problems and high inflation).
Companies, especially those in the public industry, are struggling with a shortage of available workers as they struggle to meet old-fashioned service standards set at very different times. “Society’s meanness has forced many public industries to rethink what was once believed: that the customer is always right,” writes Sarah Lyell of the Times. “If employees now have to take on many unexpected roles – a therapist, a cop negotiating a cop – then workplace managers act as security guards and assassins to protect their employees.
Some consumer behavior researchers believe Amazon is to blame for these high (and often impractical) expectations, from one-click purchases to one-day deliveries. “We call it Amazonification of Business,” said Thomas Holman, director of the Arizona Service Leadership Center. “Everyone compares to Amazon in terms of waiting in line, the types of customer interactions and the knowledge base. This view equalizes all types of business. “
It hasn’t helped that Americans are being courted by a growing number of applications and technologies that are accelerating the way they shop. Through mobile orders, instant delivery, automated chatbots and even self-service kiosks, people are promised immediateness, along with better and faster service. These tools are designed to give the customer a greater sense of control over the way they receive their goods. With it comes the pretense of effective aquatic life – at the expense of digital privacy, money and the impact of technology companies on our lives. Have you ever received a late night notice encouraging you to order food to take home?
Venture capital firms are set up in the emerging and crowded market of ultra-fast startups that are not yet profitable without the help of investors. By replacing person-to-person interactions with person-to-machine transactions, buyers are giving up the daily inconvenience of ordering or grabbing coffee. This may seem like an individual consumer choice, but it is based on the situation in retail and post-pandemic services, which can be hostile to ordinary buyers.
In October, technical writer Drew Austin noted that his regular trips to shops and pharmacies in New York were overwhelmed with unexpected inconveniences. There are fewer and fewer shift workers, which means that the queues for cash registers are longer. Meanwhile, more goods are being locked to offset the potential increase in thefts from the installation of self-service kiosks, which buyers are encouraged to use to avoid waiting in long queues.
This creates an unpleasant and inappropriate personal shopping experience in Walgreens, where one expects to rush in and out without difficulty. “The implicit message of all this for ordinary customers is that we had to stay home and order online,” Austin wrote. “These spaces are not for us. We are effectively entering the company’s warehouse. “Manhattan is like a ‘post-Covid retail wasteland,'” he said.
New Yorkers, for example, may once have needed persuasion to try instant deliveries of food or restaurants with only deliveries called “ghost kitchens” by venture capitalists. The pandemic has changed the stakes not only of consumers who have had an incentive to stay home and line up, but also of businesses that are reconsidering the need for traditional retail space. Starbucks, according to the New York Times, has closed 44 of its 235 locations in Manhattan since early 2020. However, it plans to expand its mobile pickup offerings and add more pickup-only locations.
Research by Edge of Ascential, a digital marketing consulting firm, predicts that retailers could set aside up to a third of their space, once used for personal shopping, to fulfill online orders in the coming years. This switch will probably cost businesses more money than customers to go to the store and choose the items they want. However, the way things are going, more and more people are choosing the items to be sent to them and delivered in the same week, day or even in the next 15 minutes.
This preference is not just for everyday needs such as groceries, baby formula or toilet paper. Startup companies aimed directly at consumers, especially those in home and food and beverage stores, are trying to reach city buyers through on-demand delivery. “What we are trying to achieve with fast trading is to give people the opportunity to get as close as possible to instant satisfaction,” Olipop, low-calorie alternative soda, head of customer service told Thingtesting. “If consumers are looking for a drink late at night, we want to make sure it’s Olipop.”
Despite the thriving landscape of instant delivery applications, most have not yet brought sustainable returns to investors who are pumping them with billions of dollars. As much as Amazon and couriers like DoorDash, Uber and Gopuff are pushing to turn city centers into execution centers full of ghost kitchens and ghost brands, shops – and all the inconveniences of personal shopping – will still exist in some capacity. Shoppers still love to walk around the malls, no matter how technologically adapted they are.
Amazon may have won over customers with its dazzlingly fast delivery standards, but its business model is not without its logistical complexities. One-day delivery is expensive and depends on a huge, low-paid workforce that smaller retailers cannot afford. “What solves all these problems – the high rates of return, the exorbitant cost of last mile, the nightmares of logistics, the frustration of buyers and the huge amount of consumer waste it all sends to landfills – on some level?” Shops. I’m going to the store, “wrote Amanda Mul of Atlantic.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Americans avoided personal shopping out of necessity. Today, when most companies are more or less open, they are increasingly choosing to deviate from stores due to the depreciation of customer service. This is due to the many cost-cutting factors that retailers have implemented, from the introduction of new technologies to understaffing. Meanwhile, delivery seems to be an antidote to the chaos in the store, when in fact it is not, from the point of view of retailers.
Soon, retail employees may be too overwhelmed to meet delivery quotas to be relieved that customers no longer require talking to a manager. The future of retail wants to offer customers hyperoptimized convenience. But is all this really good for us? And is it financially feasible?