My grandfather's grocery store

My grandfather ran a small grocery store in Walsenburg Colorado, a coal mining town near the New Mexico border. If you were to go into his store in 1923, you would have seen a counter on the left with fresh food and meat, and dry goods arrayed on the shelves on the other side. There was only one aisle, and I doubt if there were ever more than 10 customers in the store at any time. My grandfather and my uncles were the butchers, the produce guys, the shelf stockers, and the cashiers.

When you went in to get your groceries, they would provide what you needed by engaging you in conversation. There was simply no other way to get what you wanted, unless they already knew you well enough to get you exactly what you needed. Obviously, if the only way to get what I need as a customer is to engage in conversation, then the person that I’m dealing with will treat me courteously or risk losing my business. And it’s a small town, so if my grandfather lost one customer because of rudeness, it wouldn’t be too long before everyone knew.

This was before “customer experience” was invented. Service was by necessity personal, one to one, direct. And this was the way it was in most businesses, including banking. Schafer’s grocery was the only store in town until 1955 and then Safeway came in, much as Wal-Mart came in later. When they arrived, they brought a world of variety that was previously unimaginable, a giant world of stuff emerged. And almost immediately, my grandfather was out of business.

It’s kind of cool to understand how radical a supermarket was when it was introduced. What it did was to enable the customer to do a lot of the work with the tradeoff being wider variety. It also changed the dynamic between the customer and the merchant. No longer could the customer rely on the merchant for information or recommendations on what to buy. There were too many products and choices. So the customer moved to the brand and the product for their information. With their migration to the brand and product, the level of trust that they needed to have in the merchant was diminished as well. The merchant’s people became less important.

I think that business consciously moved away from a customer centric model to a profit centric model, and in general, customers loved it. The world before mass marketing was a fairly uninteresting place to buy stuff. Variety was very limited and local, choices were simple, and people generally didn’t have a lot of money to spend on luxuries. The explosion of retail from the supermarkets and then into other categories happened at the same time that the world was rapidly becoming more affluent and mobile.

With the increase in business models, there came an increase in busy-ness. As life became richer, it became more complex. Technological conveniences freed up time for people, and people used that time to do more things and to buy more stuff, and that became a virtuous cycle. Buy stuff to better my life and save time, use that time to make more money so that I can spend it on more stuff. And service was not an important part of the equation. Business managers aren’t stupid and when they saw that service wasn’t as important, they figured out ways to lower the cost of service, which increased profits. Increasingly technology was used to displace service quality.

Somewhere along the line, in almost every industry, customers reached a threshold of pain around service. The tradeoff between stuff and value no longer outweighed the pain of getting or using the stuff caused by the efficiency of the model. I think businesses got away with this situation until the emergence of the internet. Now, anyone with a complaint can make sure that hundreds if not millions of prospective and current customers hear about it.

Technology has gotten to the point where we are capable of replicating my grandfather's store on a mass level. We are now able to know our customers and their consumption behavior, and we have a number of different ways to speak directly to our customers. So if we can replicate his store, what should we do?

1. Let customer need drive service delivery - The customer needs exactly what she needs, exactly when she needs it.


2. Engage in dialog to make sure that all customer needs are being met - Listening and talking are the only true ways to understand what a customer needs.


3. Be aware of all customer interactions - I can't tell if the customer has gotten what she needs unless I know everything that she's buying in my store.


4. Satisfy the customer first, then sell something else - It's ok to suggest something else to the customer, like yeast to go with the flour that she's buying, as long as you've got the flour she needs.


5. Don't be rude, it's a small town - Technology enables a personal level of service but it also enables global gossip. Bad news travels at 11MPS.

We've gone through a revolution in delivery of goods and services, and we lost some of the important things that work well along the way. Think of my grandfather's store as you consider your customer experience and consider moving the customer relationship back to where it needs to be...personal, one to one, direct.