We Deserve Better

A while ago, I decided to treat the family to a delicious hamburger feast at my favorite fast food restaurant.  These guys have great burgers and you could make them as small or big as you wanted.  Depending upon my disposition and morning scale reading, I would order anything from a single cheeseburger to a double or even triple cheeseburger.  If I had been logging a lot of miles on the bike, I occasionally would order the triple cheeseburger (three quarter pounds of beef) and extra large fries.  One of this chain’s selling points was offering totally individualized products.  You could have just the combination of toppings and side dishes that you wanted. Everything uniquely constructed for each customer.  After receiving our order in the drive through, I pulled forward and asked my son Pete to check the bag to ensure the order is correct.  Upon inspection, he said the double cheeseburger I ordered with ketchup, onions and mayo came fully loaded with all toppings.  Good news is they gave us an extra order of fries.

I said, “This will take a minute.  I’m going to talk to the Manager.”  I parked.  Pete and my daughter Katie sensed that this was going to be a conversation they did not want miss.  So the three of us trundled inside to speak with the Chief of Operations.

The Manager politely agreed to see us.  He asked if there was a problem.  I said:

“No, quite the contrary.  Does March  27, 2016 mean anything to you?  That was the first time I came to your fine establishment and ordered a meal at the Drive Thru.  I asked for a single cheeseburger meal with ketchup, onions and mayonnaise and a vanilla shake.  You served a double cheeseburger with everything and a chocolate shake.  That was three years and two months ago.  Since then, I have returned to your restaurant thirty seven times and on all thirty seven occasions the food we received has been different than the food we ordered.  Today you changed the toppings and gave us an extra order of fries.  Rarely in modern America does anyone perform with such incredible consistency.  Thirty seven out of thirty seven covering more than a three year span. This is marvelous.  Your reliability is an inspiration to us all.”       

I gave the Manager a firm handshake and a warm smile.  Needless to say he was speechless.  I encouraged him to keep up the good work and we left.

This is a great example of something that is wrong in America.  The brilliant marketing managers at Acme Burgers come up with a strategy that will differentiate them from the “one size fits all” burger outlets.  The Chief Marketing Officer decides to tailor the products to the unique taste of each customer.  The Chief Financial Officer, however, squeezes the pennies.  “It is great to offer a lot of options to our customers but we can’t afford to add staff to ensure that the orders are correct.  If we do, the golden arch guys will eat our lunch because they don’t need more staff for their rubber stamp, all identical, burger menu.  Acme is a huge and successful company.  They know that there is a high failure rate in the tailoring process.  They also know that most of us in America are accustomed to not getting exactly what we order.  So they believe that our expectations are so low that we will anticipate a lot of errors and come back anyway.  Not delivering is, actually, a calculated corporate strategy made at the most senior level of the company.

We deserve better.

This is just one of many examples where consumers lower their expectations to accommodate intentionally shoddy performance by retailers.  One of the biggest brick and mortar pharmacies puts Acme Burgers in short pants.  Medicine For The Masses has an establishment on every other block of every city in America.  Senior management has created a corporate vision of happy customers breezing through checkout by pushing a few buttons in a sales kiosk. When one of the happy patrons buys something, they are provided with a long list of attractive discounts that AI has assembled for them based on their shopping history.  The discounts will bring them back and the kiosks are designed to make the customers perform all of the sales activities.  A great concept that requires really great systems and software.  I can see myself seated at the board room when the following conversation takes place. 

The Chief Marketing Officer says, “We have a brief window of opportunity to switch all of our point of sale functions to customer controlled kiosks.  They can easily execute all of the sales functions.  We can tailor discounts and special offers to their buying history”.  The Chief Financial Officer chimes in “This is great because we can dramatically reduce our sales and support staff by passing over all of the data entry and checkout functions to our customers”.  The Chief Information Officer notes “This is a fabulous idea.  We need to double the IT budget and we can have this functionality in place in three years”.  The room gets quiet.  The Chief Marketing Officer says to the CIO, “Fred, we can’t wait three years.  We need this in four months.  That kind of performance by IT cost your predecessor, Bob, his job.  When we hired you last June we expected a better response on these types of projects.”  So the whole group decides that they can go ahead with the four month project.  Sure there will be problems but all IT projects have problems.  Good news is that our customers live in America and have very low performance expectations for point of sale systems.

So what really happens when I go to Medicine For The Masses.  I want to pick up two prescriptions and buy some shaving cream with a “half off” coupon.  I stop at the pharmacy first.  There is no longer a clerk at the check out counter.  There is a kiosk.  The clerk used to ask for my last name and date of birth. When I provide five seconds of information, I have my prescriptions.  With the marvelous new kiosks, I have to manually input full name, date of birth, and phone number.  It asks a security question.  “What is the complete American Kennel Club name of your third dog and what is the breed.”  Strangely, I don’t have all of the information.  The pharmacist senses that we have a problem and offers to help.  In the past, this was done by the pick up clerk but they don’t have anyone in that position any longer.  The pharmacist can’t make it work either so he goes back to his terminal and finds a way to execute the transaction.  I’m not happy with the wonderful new process and the pharmacist is really unhappy. Now I go to the front of the store to a different kiosk.  I continue to perform all of the sales functions on a totally different terminal.  Good news is the only information I need to input is my phone number.  The system recognizes my account and tells me to scan my items.  Next step, scan my coupon and insert it into the machine.  The terminal says that the coupon is not valid for this account.  In addition, the terminal ate my coupon before sending me this message.  I push the help button.  The only person available to help is the store manager.  She says she is sorry that I am having problems but she can make it work.  After fifteen minutes she can’t make it work either.  She voids the transaction and goes to the Manager Only terminal and rings everything up and manually rings up the appropriate discount.

So what has just happened?  I wasted twenty five minutes for two simple transactions.  It required eight minutes of time from the pharmacist and fifteen minutes of time from the store manager.  Their compensation is slightly higher than the pick up clerk and the cashier that were let go. 

I am not happy and the pharmacist and store manager are really unhappy.  If you are going to “go live” with sophisticated systems, they should actually work.  Eventually, the terrible performance by the kiosks will filter back to the senior management team of Medicine For The Masses.  Being the new guy on the block, CIO Fred, will be blamed for non delivery even though he properly sized up the effort as a three year project to begin with.  Fred will, unfairly, lose his job.  In essence, nobody is happy.

We deserve better.        

It seems like much of my life is wrapped up in accommodating really crummy solutions that soak up way too much of my time.  A few well thought out and well executed technological solutions really work very nicely.  However, this is far less than the norm.  Big corporations get away with shoddy service because they believe we all see the world as Tony Hillerman describes in his autobiography, “Seldom Disappointed”.  In essence, Tony says that the best way to avoid disappointment is to lower your expectations.  If you don’t expect good service, you won’t be disappointed when you don’t get it.

I think we deserve better.  When I see a situation where I am getting poor service that I don’t deserve, I am changing vendors. So I am changing pharmacies.  I am moving to The Other Apothecary On The Block, Inc.  I hope it is better but if not, I will find someone else.

I tried to do this with Acme Burgers.  However, I cave to my craving for a double cheeseburger with ketchup, onions and mayo, at least twice a year. Far less than my previous weekly habit. Last week I went through the Drive Thru and ordered my unique favorite. I got a double hamburger (no cheese) with mustard.  Amazingly, the streak is still intact.  That was the fifty third consecutive visit resulting in a delivery error. 

53 and 0!  You have to love that level of consistency! 

We deserve better.