Michael Eriksson
A Swede in Germany
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Poor decisions

Introduction

I have always been puzzled by the many poor decisions made in business and, in particular, the apparent lack of “inspect and adapt” and optimizations of various kinds. Below, I will over time give some discussion and some examples with a focus on B2C settings. The starting examples are some very recent experiences, with no attempt to dig back in time. Other pages in this category can contain longer examples, but often deal with unrelated or merely overlapping issues, e.g. general incompetence or customer unfriendliness.


Side-note:

There is nothing inherently B2C about poor decisions; however, much of my own exposure has, understandably, been as the “C” in a B2C setting, and such examples are more likely to be relatable to the average reader than, say, an example of poor handling of some aspect of software development (where I have most of my behind-the-scenes experiences).

Some texts in my category on software development do contain such examples. Some more general examples from the office can be found in my category on company life.

Indeed, there is not even anything inherently “B” about poor decisions and other portions of this website contain other examples yet. Note, in particular, my category on politics.


Discussion

Optimization as a task for kids

During my first years in school, we were read a (fiction) book about a clever young man who made various optimizations in stores, like making sure to keep the basics of life, e.g. milk and bread, at the back of the store (so that visitors had to go through the entire store to reach them, potentially picking up a few other things on the way)—while keeping the superfluous or tempting items, e.g. chocolate bars, at the cash registers so that the customers were guaranteed exposure and, at least with a long queue, some period of temptation.


Side-note:

What the name of the book was, I do not remember, but it was likely a Swedish book to begin with.

As an aside, this is an example of potentially poor decisions in education: There is often a drive to have kids listen to readings, be it by teachers, parents, or other kids. (We often, and for a good many years, had a “reading” activity, where the one kid read a page while the others listened, the next kid read a page and the others listened, etc. We might, to boot, have wasted half the time laughing at odd misreadings.) I have even heard claims that parents should read more to their children in order to improve the children’s literacy. However, literacy is improved by reading, not by listening.

Further, reading is such a central skill that it might be better to have a first-grader read for an hour a day and then be set free than to have him spend a day in school while reading for ten minutes. What is read is secondary until the kids read sufficiently well. (In my case, “Donald Duck” comics were central to my early improvements.)


Now, this being Sweden, the point of the book was likely more “see what evil methods capitalists use” than to, say, create an interest in optimization. Nevertheless, it did create some interest, I thought that this was something that I would be good at, and it is clear that the general idea of e.g. optimization of a store layout is something that the author considered easy enough for a kid to understand.

Even today, likely more than forty years later, this is not something that stores have in grip. Yes, there is often someone in charge of such matters, but the work performed is usually poor, some have a sudden wake-up call to optimize after neglecting the matter for years (and then behave as if the idea was novel and a sign of progressiveness—rather than the stuff of a decades old children’s book), and the main effect discernible for the customers is often an occasional complete upheaval of the store, with ensuing chaos, a loss of knowledge of where to find what, etc., that does more harm than good—because the new layout might well be different but is not usually better, on balance, than the old one. (A semi-recent Aldi makeover had stores outright closed for at least a full day and achieved next to nothing.)

Two cautions, however:

Firstly, when judging the quality of optimization (not limited to the layout of a store), it is important to keep in mind that the optimization might aim at e.g. profitability—not e.g. customer experience. Correspondingly, while, say, a customer unfriendly approach or solution is somewhat likely to be a sign of poor decisions, lack of optimization, or similar, it is not conclusive proof, because some other goal than customer satisfaction might be pursued. At an extreme, consider TV commercials and the extremely negative effect that they have on the “viewer experience”. Likewise, the idea of having milk and bread at the back of the store, as above, would be an example of an attempt to maximize profitability, even should the customers prefer it differently. (However, customer preferences can, of course, also affect profitability, which might explain why many stores actually have bread comparatively close to the entrance, while advertising-financed media do have a problem with loss of viewers/readers/whatnot.)

Secondly, different customers can have radically different preferences. For instance, it used to be that the local Akzenta had a separate room at the back of the store for items like toilet paper, tooth brushes, detergent, and various feminine this-and-that. This was excellent in my eyes: on the rare occasions that I had a need for something in this family, I knew where to go; on the much more common occasions when I was only looking only for food, I lost neither walking distance nor shelf space to toilet paper and whatnot. Today, these once-in-a-blue-moon items are the first thing after entering the store proper, wasting both space and time—to me. However, there might be others who see it differently. (I note e.g. that there is a sign that indicates a portion of this area to be a “beauty lounge”, or some similar nonsensical and, for a German store, nonsensically English name, which points strongly to an attempt to serve and/or trick specifically female customers.)

Optimization as mouth service

Many give mouth service to optimization and/or quality, but with very little actual result. (The idea is, of course, not limited to children’s books. For instance, “Six Sigma”, one of the more popular and systematic schemes, goes back to the 1980s, almost as old as that book, and has been accused of doing more to re-package old ideas than to generate new ones.)

For instance, to me, it is obvious that if someone has a product on the market, then he should take customer experiences into account to make the next iteration better—but this is rarely the case. In software development, it can be even worse, with a management attitude of “throw features at the product and see what sticks”, while bugs in old features might go unfixed for years.

For instance, in most of my past Scrum projects, few colleagues have had any real understanding of the central idea of “inspect and adapt” and even Scrum masters often had an attitude that resembled a cargo cult—“Scrum consists of doing A, B, and C, so we will do A, B, and C, which will make it Scrum”, while the purpose of doing A, B, and C was neglected. (We might e.g. have particular meeting held for the right duration and at the right time during the Sprint, but with no eye at actually achieving what Scrum intends the meeting to achieve.)

Examples

Sound and prices

The eventual trigger for this text was an experience at my local Akzenta earlier today (2024-12-17), caused by a long-standing problem:

The acoustics around the cash registers is so poor that I often have to guess at what the cashier claimed to be my total—or, worse, that I hear one thing and find something different on the receipt. Today, I distinctly heard “X.18”, handed over a bill and a 20-cent coin, received an odd amount of coins back, and later found an “X.58” on my receipt. (The exact value of X is irrelevant, but was an integer around 15—not, however, 18.)


Side-note:

I can, of course, not rule out that the cashier in any given case, including the one above, has misspoken; however, this is likely to be rarer than acoustic misunderstandings. I note, in particular, that similar misunderstandings are much rarer at (the acoustically superior) Aldi, while there is no obvious reason why cashiers at Akzenta would misspeak more often than those at Aldi.


Compounding the issue is that there is no textual display of the price available. In contrast, at Aldi there is a gadget to pay by card next to the customer, which clearly displays the price, allowing a quick look to remove any uncertainty. Adding such a display, with or without a card reader would avoid a great many misunderstandings at a relative low cost.


Side-note:

I usually give it such a quick look, even when I have a clear impression of the spoken price, because of an unrelated problem: Spoken German treats many numbers differently than does English and my native Swedish. For instance, 25 is spoken as (the equivalent of) “five-and-twenty” (“fünf-und-zwanzig”). This still occasionally trips me up, in that I might hear “five-and-twenty” and assume a 52. (Sometimes, these days, because of hypercorrection: I hear “five-and-twenty”, do understand a 25, and then turn it around in my head to be 52, because the habit of correcting my first impression has become ingrained. This worked well in those days when that first impression usually was faulty, but not these days, when it usually is correct.)

With the above 18, this is not an issue, because all three languages have the same reversal, even if, as with “eighteen” resp. “achtzehn”, it is more blurred than with “five-and-twenty” resp. “fünf-und-zwanzig”. However, the reversal present in 58 (“eight-and-fifty”/“acht-und-fünfzig”) does increase the likelihood of a mishearing relative English, because 18 and 58 begin in the same way when spoken.


The main issue, however, is that of acoustics, in a big hall, with a long line of registers, open space to a bakery and several eateries/whatnots, with a high roof, and a marble (or other stone—I have not paid proper attention to this) floor. Some dampening material here and a partition there could work wonders at a low cost, and would bring positive side-effects like less noise stress on the cashiers throughout their working day (as well as the customers, of course, but their exposure is much shorter, which makes a considerable difference).

This is the more annoying as Akzenta was very aggressive in putting up (mostly pointless or, according to some, even harmful) plastic barriers to block COVID infections, which shows how fast something can be done when the will is there. Of course, these plastic barriers made the communication issues far worse, as they partially blocked the voices of the cashiers and customers relative each other. While these barriers are now gone, there might have been a period of around two years when misunderstandings, “How much did you say?”, and/or blanket payment with a single believed-to-be-large-enough bill was extremely common among those who paid in cash.

Poor handling of acoustics, noise dampening, and whatnot is, unfortunately, not limited to Akzenta. For instance, the libraries in Wuppertal that I have visited have often had similar problems with open spaces, marble/stone floors, and little thought of noise handling—despite how many are in a library for reading, school work, or similar. For instance, some restaurants make similar mistakes, often compounded by a too weak partition between eating areas and areas for cooking, washing up, whatnot and/or a too lax attitude towards children. I recall a Pizza Hut in Cologne particularly negatively, where the poor acoustics made the noise level a nuisance even during calm hours—never mind “rush hours”.

Poor entry/exit handling

Buying new shoes, I was again struck by the poor entry/exit handling in the building at hand. The building could be seen as a miniature mall, with:

  1. A two-storey shoe shop to the left of the main entry. (Covering portions of the ground and basement floors. This, of course, was my destination at the time.)

  2. A three-storey shop to the right, with a variety of things, ranging from office supplies to electronics, toys to candy. (Covering most of the middle floor, half the ground floor, and portions of the basement).

  3. A large grocery shop. (Covering most of the basement.)

  4. A large one-euro shop. (Covering most of the top floor.)

  5. At least (!) one other entry (a tobacco or whatnot hole-in-the-wall shop).

  6. To boot, there appears to be some access to parking facilities, but, not having a car, I have never looked into this.


Side-note:

Various remarks:

I use “shop” over “store” because of the repeated use of “storey”. (Barring slips.)

I use “floor” mostly for the building as a whole; “storey” for the individual shops.

I use “entry” with no restriction on directions and with no exclusion on the ability to exit the same way.

Claims about sizes and whatnot are extremely approximate and from memory.

In the continuation, note that I, of course have no objections to a shop that has both an entry from the free air and one connected to the rest of the building.


Now, what would be more natural than to have the main entry to the building also serve as the main entry to the shops at the left and right, just as it (almost necessarily) does to the other shops? This, especially, with an eye at going from one shop to the next (or to/from parking) without leaving the building; and, especially, with the benefits that can come from the impression of a mall, shoppers in one shop moving to the next, etc.

Apparently, to have both of them exclusively use separate entries/exits to the free air.

The shoe shop does have a connecting door to the hallway that follows the main entry, but this door has been sealed off for years. The reason, so volunteered an employee, was that there had been repeated cases of grabbing-and-running through that door. While this is a legitimate reason to close off the door (if warranted by a cost–benefit analysis—not just a knee-jerk reaction), the underlying problem was telling. In an approximate paraphrase of his words, “some genius at corporate had decided to restructure all stores without paying attention to the risk of theft”, and it seems likely, then, that the door had not had such problems before the restructuring. Based on the distance between the door to the hallway and the door to the free air, it would indeed not be hard to place checkouts and whatnots to serve and surveil both at the same time. Moreover, if a restriction to a single entry truly was needed, which I doubt, it would have been more natural to pick the hallway entry. Moreover, the way that checkouts are placed (at the very back of the shop), it is hard to see how the remaining entry would be less vulnerable to a grab-and-run. On the outside, there might be a lesser risk that the thief can go into rapid hiding, but even that is unlikely to make a world of difference.

The shop to the right does have an entry from the rest of the building on the mid floor (of the building -> the top storey of the shop), but none on the ground floor and (to my recollection) none on the basement floor. During large parts of the COVID-countermeasure era, even this mid-floor entry was closed off, as was most or all of the top storey—the odder as keeping them open would have reduced, not increased, the risk of infection, and as, in a pinch, the shop could have been separated into two separate entities, allowing a continued serving of customers on both floors while remaining in compliance with the COVID-regulations in force at the time. (The same, likely, did not apply to the storey in the basement, as there was no separate means of entry.)