When it rains it pours… or snows.
It isn’t fun when “snow happens” – all kidding aside – things that you cannot control no matter how much you try, will happen.
Did we wish for snow for our Thanksgiving holiday? or our Valentines or Easter holiday? No, probably not. Sure, probably for Christmas it would be nice, unless you have tickets to fly out to a southern, warm holiday getaway on 12/25.
But, for the busiest travel day of the year, snow is not a good thing. While it may or may not affect retailers too very much – snow on Black Friday would more likely affect them negatively – there are restaurants and specialty stores that are seeing a huge impact due to today’s weather.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do about it.
There are things that you can do however, to ensure that your customers enjoy their experience. A few little things to consider based on what happened to us today.
- Make sure that your bags do not rip because you are trying too hard to be environmentally friendly or to save money (sure the environment is important, but if we can’t hold our produce in a bag that doesn’t break, we will stop buying it from you, the demand will go down, people will stop planting apple trees and then, where is the environment?)
- Lids on containers should fit, or stick, or stay on… otherwise your customers’ stuff, again, will fall out and they will not only make a mess, they will get annoyed. They may think it is time to stop shopping with you.
- If customers get annoyed, be sure to have friendly, helpful employees, who will try their best to make it better.
Today’s lesson is – control what you can – and when you can’t control it – make the best of it, with great employees who are trained on how to make the best of a bad situation – even when *Snow* Happens.
~ Dawn aka Hat Girl
PS It also helps to have a 9 year old comedienne along for the shop, who calmly looks at the olives all over the floor (after already having helped pick up 8 beautiful, shiny, now bruised, Granny Smith apples) and says – after verifying what lane we were in – “CLEAN UP IN AISLE 2!!” with a smirk and a smile followed by “I’ve always wanted to say that!” 🙂