Retail Details: Here five things to think about this summer:

By Doug Fleener

1. Customers are more impatient in the summer and are less likely to wait in long checkout lines or spend much time looking for a store employee to help them. Customers are either in a hurry to get somewhere, or they are hot, tired, and interested only in hassle-free shopping. Make sure your customers are greeted and those in a hurry are quickly helped. Also be sure and keep your store cool, even on the days you get your electric bill.

2. Offer every customer who comes into your store a cold drink. Whether it's bottled water with your logo on the bottle or a water cooler with paper cups, what's important is to offer it to the customer upon entering the store. It will make your customers happy, have them stay in the store longer, and you'll stand out from your competition.

3. An overlooked market opportunity is products for customer's second homes. Targeting and supplying products for vacation homes can be quite lucrative. Customers want many of the same amenities in their second home they in their primary residence, but they don't want to spend as much on them. The key is to communicate function, form, and value. Offer to ship products for either no or a low charge and offer to coordinate the date the products will arrive. Too many retailers think the process of furnishing and outfitting vacation homes is just like the process of furnishing a primary residence, and that's a mistake.

4. Summer time is vacation time and with that comes challenges in keeping the store well staffed. Remembering that customers will be more impatient in the summer, it is critical that you have enough staff on the floor to meet your business needs. Because most companies give out paid vacations they have a tendency to count the vacation hours against a store's payroll, which causes them to go understaffed, resulting in missed sales and potentially lost customers.

Consider investing in some seasonal help to get you through vacations. Doing this will also enable you build a bench for next holiday season and other times you need additional coverage. Managers and assistants may hate to hear this but they may also need to work an iron shift (open to close) to help cover the store as well.

5. Last but not least, store employees, just like the rest of us, also have social events that they want to attend this summer. Just like the busy winter holidays, balancing the needs of the business and the employee is never easy but it's very important. Too many managers don't even try to strike the balance. Some of them are too rigid with staff's schedule, causing them to either lose employees or at the very least have unhappy employees in the store. (And we know the impact on the customer's experience when that happens.) Other managers are too liberal with the schedule, creating understaffed stores and missed opportunities.

One solution is to use more seasonal staff on the weekends and rotating the weekend days off among the regular staff. Another solution is what I call the Summer Trump Card. Every regular employee is given a Summer Trump Card which gives them the opportunity to request any day or night off with only 24 hours notice. This way, if an employee maybe gets a last minute invite to a concert or to go boating they don't feel like they can't do it. The manager then asks another employee to cover their shift. If they do, they get the other staff member's Summer Trump Card to use when they want. If no staff member will cover the shift then a member of management will need to cover it. Most of the time someone will cover the shift but every now and then the manager has to bite the bullet and do the shift. That's why you're paid the big bucks!

Having happy staff members in the summer who don't feel like they can't do things that non-retail people do easily outweighs the short-term staffing needs created by use of the Summer Trump Card.




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