The truth behind a store that may seem like chaos
The idea of a messy store is quite familiar to me. My first and only job (besides babysitting if that even counts) was working at Home Goods. In case you are unfamiliar, Home Goods is a part of the TJX company which includes stores like TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeSense, and a few others which are not as mainstream. The aim of the company is to sell high-end, often designer products at a reduced price.
Part of my job was to recover the store. This occurred at the end of the day (usually around 4 or 5 pm). Basically, each employee would get assigned a section of the store and we were responsible for going through each aisle and organizing it. This includes finding anything that was put in the wrong place and returning it. You would not believe how lazy some people are. The store itself is not that big, yet people refuse to walk back and put an item where it belongs so they just leave it in the wrong section. I would find soaps in the pillow section, pans shoved between sets of sheets, and even empty Starbucks cups in with the stationary. This truly is a testament to how lazy some shoppers are. It really is not that difficult to put a pillow back in its place, yet some people believe it is acceptable to leave it on the ground.
Managers and employees would receive many complaints about how messy the store was, often from Rae Dunn loving Karens. It was very difficult for us to constantly keep the store clean. On any given day we would have hundreds of customers shopping in the store, moving items around and not putting them back. This especially was a problem on weekends. We were often understaffed, and most of our employees were either ringing people up or putting new merchandise on the floor, so there was no one to recover the store at all times. Obviously, it was not going to be super clean when hundreds of people were moving things around from opening at 9 am until anyone was around to recover the section later on in the evening.
Most of us who did work on recovering the floor were people like me, high schoolers just looking for some extra money to pay for food, clothes, and school. Obviously, we do not owe our lives to the company, and many of these part time employees were not that committed to really making the store nice and clean for shoppers. This laziness can be reflected in the work of recovering. Because the store was often understaffed, no one would be fired for not doing sufficient work, and without this reinforcement, many employees believed that they could do the least amount of work in order to get by and still get paid. In reality, how can you really force 16 year olds to go above and beyond if they know they will get paid the same for doing a lesser amount of work?
The biggest money maker for TJX as a whole is their credit card. This was drilled into our heads as employees. We needed to ask every single customer if they were interested. Managers really pushed for this because if someone signed up for a credit card while they were on duty they would be rewarded with a bonus.
Psychologists like BF Skinner have explained how rewards and punishments can motivate people to accomplish things. This can be seen in environments such as the one here in the Home Goods and TJX stores overall. The company makes more of a profit if more people have their credit card (they don’t need to pay a fee to other card companies). Therefore, they reward their managers when they get cards, and their employees when they get a customer to sign up (we would get either a pin to put on our aprons or a candy bar!). This was really the key part of business; if it was the store’s appearance, there would be more rewards for doing good work on this end.
Because there was no real reward or punishment for doing great work in recovering, employees were not always motivated to do a great job. That mixed with lazy customers who do not care to put things where they belong or who are willing to mess up sections of the store and not clean up after themselves leads to the messiness of the store.
A good business strategy includes a variety of rewards and punishments for people at all levels of the food chain. Corporate workers deserve to be rewarded and punished, as do managers, and even part time workers. By using rewards and punishments, worker productivity and efficiency can increase in all business models.