It’s lunchtime on High Street Kensington, one of the busiest shopping streets in London… and perhaps the country.
I’m inside H&M, buying a few garments for the winter period two weeks before Christmas on my break. But, to purchase them, I will have to queue.
That’s fine. After all, queuing is in our DNA. However, the queue hardly budges. Soon, there are nearly 20 shoppers behind me, snaking into the middle of the store. Some abandon it out of frustration. I’m tempted to join them.
Others tap feet, glance at watches, sigh. Not quite the shopping experience you’d expect from one of the biggest clothes retailers on the planet.
H&M bosses decided a while back to slim down the number of manned tills in this shop. Now, on the ground floor, there are just two – with four self-checkouts next to them.
On my frustrating outing, three of the self-checkouts – powered by Fujitsu – are not on for whatever reason, and the one that is has an occasional baffled customer.
Checkout cheek: Why has it become such a palaver to buy items in shops?
No staff member is helping on the self-checkout and the few customers brave enough to embrace it are expected to remove security tags, and fold items into their bag.
The manned tills also deal with returns, which adds to the pain of a man just looking to snap up a pair of jeans and a shirt, then get on with life.
Eventually, I get to the till. No apology for the wait, let alone an acknowledgment I exist. Indeed, the staff member spends quite a bit of the transaction speaking to her colleague about lunch breaks.
‘Excuse me,’ I ask. ‘Will your bosses be putting more manned tills into this store next year? The queues seem mad every time I come in now. It never used to be like this.’
The staff member mistook me for blaming it on her. I don’t blame her at all. I’d be frazzled trying to deal with this huge queue.
I took the shrug as: ‘Probably not.’
To get an answer, instead, I contacted H&M directly to ask what it’s playing at. Does it want customers? Is it monitoring the queues? Why have self-checkouts if they’re not on?
And most importantly, will it listen and re-install a couple more manned tills?
A spokesman said: ‘At H&M we are constantly pushing ourselves to offer the best possible experience for our customers.
‘We utilise a mix of self-checkouts and manned tills with the aim of providing customers with a faster and more convenient shopping experience and we adapt our approach to each store.
‘Any future changes will be based on customer feedback and operational efficiency and our primary goal is to enhance customer satisfaction.
‘We have seen a very positive response from our customers with approximately 40-50 per cent choosing the self-checkout option when it is available.’
That doesn’t mimic my experience. Are half of shoppers happy to just blindly use self-checkouts now?
It feels more shops have really upped the ante with self-checkouts since the summer, and maybe it is all coming home to roost in the run-up to Christmas.
On Saturday, I undertook a task I seldom do these days… I went to a giant supermarket early doors to do a full trolley-loaded shop sans kids.
I’ve been pushed to having an online delivery pass these days, but I wanted to actually get inspired in the shop ahead of Christmas. Plus, I nearly always forget some crucial items in the online shop.
When I finished the mammoth task, I arrived at the tills to find… there were no manned ones available.
That’s right, one of the biggest supermarket chains in the country had no staff on tills. I certainly wasn’t going to scan a plus-£200 shop myself.
I was in some sort of weird Mexican stand-off with a staff member, who kept calling me ‘mate’, as I tried to badger her to open a till.
Soon, a handful of other shoppers were with me, awaiting further instruction. Such a bizarre experience, all to simply pay for my shopping at a supermarket I have chosen to give custom to.
Eventually, two tills were opened, and queues formed. Half of the manned tills in this store have disappeared this year.
It’s all getting out of hand. I argued last year that while self-checkouts are fine for some grocery basket shopping, it’s driving more of us online and my belief is shoppers are becoming fed-up. It only appears to have gotten worse.
Is it because self-checkouts don’t have National Insurance contributions to fork out for? Pension plans? A salary?
That was what was insinuated by the boss of fast-food chain Itsu recently.
Customer service in big retailers has gone completely down the drain this year in my opinion. It’s a real shame.
I’m now on a one-man campaign to get retailers to see sense. Not abandon self-checkouts altogether, but not abandon manned checkouts for something bosses see as cheaper… and giving the spiel that it’s more convenient. Sometimes it is, often it isn’t.
So, let me know your horror stories: lee.boyce@thisismoney.co.uk. I will take them to the retailers in question…
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