Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Blue Bottle Coffee switches to Square there was a noticeable decline in the throughput at the cash register. It just takes the retail employee longer to do anything on an iPad. Pretty much everything can be done faster on a real cash register. There have also been the requisite outages, of course. Recently I was at Blue Bottle and the Square terminal wasn't opening the cash drawer. They were making change out of…
There's something that a lot of retailers don't get - never put an obstacle in front of the customer giving you their money. Don't let lines form at checkouts. Don't clog up the counter with impulse-purchase stuff. Don't put displays in the path of customers headed for checkout. Don't make customers jump through hoops with loyalty cards and data entry. Don't do anything that slows the checkout process. There are expe…
I did consulting for them and they hired aforementioned retail consultants for this job. I will admit I initially thought it was stupid, having been a wise retail manager at the age of 17 at one point in my life (and did a lot of level-1 tracking of sales and A/B testing, even back then!). But when these retail consultants showed me their data and how it was formatted... it was unbelievable. Most of what I experienced in retail were these nebulous and stupid ideas that were conjured from the ether from my direct managers and general managers and the like. While I'm sure not all the information I saw trickled down to employees, it was truly enlightening and gave me zero room to argue particulars with how they were studying and implementing retail flow, checkout, and return procedures.