The idea being it reduces the number of staff needed to run the store because now we can restock shelves uninterrupted.
Of course, that’s not what’s happening. Instead of being asked where our canned mushrooms are, we’re now being asked where aisle 31 is, and we’re having to take extra time to find out what their actual question is.
Because there are only 14 aisles in the store.
Oh, and I actually like being asked where stuff is, because it breaks up the monotony of bringing out rollcomp, rotating, stocking, facing up, putting back rollcomp, repeat until lunch.
So now they can’t get the shelves stocked having made their staff smaller and given them more questions to answer. They’ve also given the customer a worse experience because they used AI for a task easily accomplished by normal means, which if successful would drive down sales as people would just buy what they came in for.
A stunning level of idiocy on display.
Everything is already on a planagram. It would be trivial to do.
Planos come from multiple sources in my store; some come down from on high, some come from suppliers who buy out entire shelves (or even entire bays apparently), some come direct from the store management, and occasionally I get one or two that’s hand-drawn and I have absolutely no clue where they came from but I’m not paid enough to care.
Just have it pop up a question on our Telxons, we can update the locations when we’re restocking.
Being generous, I could see A use case for translating whatever the customer says (because how often have you known something exists, but not what it’s called?) into an actual product and then looking it up in a proper database. This, though, is bound to fail.
I live in a country where they speak my second language. I prefer to explain what i’m looking for to a person because sometimes AI doesn’t understand my spanish. At least native speakers understand what i mean when i describe something.
My biggest experience of this is that those systems just aren’t updated. So they will have rearranged a bunch of stuff and now the website is wrong. When they’re doing it right, the same system that generates the printouts to tell store workers where to move things is also connected to the site. But there’s still errors. An AI isn’t going to solve that in any meaningful way, you just need to pay someone to check the locations of the top 100-200 selling items. Or niche items or whatever works to reduce the number on enquiries. It’s pawbably much cheaper to do that once a month, or once every three months, than pay OpenAI for a huge contract. Have that person rotate through all the stores in a region. But that would be too bloody smart for a business to do.
I don’t know if it exists in the UK, but there’s a craft store chain in the US called Michael’s, and when Covid kicked up they changed a lot about how their business is done.
So many things went online-only after 2020. I’m a life-long artist/crafter, and let me tell you, the people making decisions at this place clearly have no idea how crafters’ minds work. We don’t always go into stores with a particular goal in mind - sometimes we go in just to see what’s there and get inspired to try something new. We see things we didn’t think about, but once we see it, we know exactly what we want to make/how we want to work an item into a project.
But in order to do that, things have to physically be in the store. We aren’t going to impulse-buy something that isn’t there. Obviously.
As far as art supplies go, I’d much rather buy something I can physically interact with before purchasing - this tool says it has an ergonomic grip, but does it actually feel better in my hand or is it just hype? Can I trust a screen’s color rendering to faithfully represent the hue of this product? Will the feeling of this yarn be comfortable to wear as clothing?
Sometimes, we have to experience a product to really decide if we want it. Some art supplies might be fine to order online, sight unseen, but to rely on that alone (as a seller) is absolutely foolish.
I guess my wallet should be thanking Michaels, but I’m too frustrated by so many things becoming “online only” to really appreciate the inadvertent savings. I’m far from the only crafter/artist that follows their energy in the moment, and if I go to an arts and crafts store and get told I need to order a product online and wait for it, that can be enough friction to scrap the entire idea. I need to follow my artistic energy when it occurs. If I put it off til later, the project might never happen - because I’ll be onto something else by then.
But if the company really insists on misunderstanding their customers and shooting themselves in the foot, I’m not gonna stop them.
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