Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
Issue link: https://sct.epubxp.com/i/390025
What The Home Depot discovered 10 years ago, others are discovering today. To trim expenses and boost profits, Home Depot began drastically cutting full-timers in the early 2000s, a strategy that worked initially. Customer ser- vice and satisfaction began to wane, however, and same-store sales declined, prompting the home-improvement chain to re-engage more service-savvy full-timers. At Walmart, mean- while, after a similar austerity push last fall resulted in poorly stocked shelves, long waits at the checkout counters and flagging sales, the company announced that 35,000 of its part-timers would move back to full-time. With store footfall rates down because of e-commerce, merchants are forced to take a more holistic retailing or AbouT A DeCADe noW, u.S. retailers have been replacing full-time workers with part-timers, a prac- tice that began picking up steam during the recession. but some of the consequences — cautious-spending and dissatisfied consumers, erratic service and long checkout lines at stores — have prompted several promi- nent retailers to rethink the strategy. approach and to differentiate themselves with a full-time commitment to serv- ing the customer, says bob Phibbs, who heads his own consulting firm called The retail Doctor. "retailers might feel like they can just dial back all the knobs, but if they don't pay their people, they are go- ing to pay in other ways." The overuse of part-timers "is destroying brands," Phibbs said. "not everything in retail should be driven by bean counters." Those lessons still seem lost on the large investment firms that have been snapping up retail chains of late, said in- dustry consultant Jeff Green, who runs an eponymous firm in Phoenix. "When ven- ture capital buys retail, the customer expe- rience is way down their list of priorities," Green said. "And that's a pretty darned important function: the act of getting cus- tomers through their transactions." There is no official data source on F Half staff Are retAilers hurting their brAnds by relying more on pArt-timers? By Steve McLinden r e t a i l i n g t o d a y 18 S C t / o c t o b e r 2 0 1 4