I remember the grocery store I worked at started posting the rate for each cashier of items scanned per minute logged into a register. They didn’t say anything about it, but I now realize they were probably leading into using that data as justification for something.
My dumbass 16 year old self thought “I’m going to get that number so high it breaks the system.” I would lock my station after the previous customer, and take a little time to face all of the UPC codes and look up produce codes and make a general strategy. Then, I would unlock the register, scan like a madman, then lock it and casually start bagging. The customers would get concerned they needed to hurry up based on my fervor, so I would tell them “Take all the time you need, see that show yesterday?”
Next time they posted the rankings, my number was 20x as high as second place. After a few weeks of getting my number a little higher each time, my boss’ boss came by and told me to knock it off since I was polluting their metrics. Next week no new rankings.
I like to think I inadvertently helped prevent KPI nonsense.
The grocery store I worked for, over 20 years ago, did something similar, with similar results. All it did was incentivize locking and unlocking the register as optimally as possible. They also tracked how often and when in the transaction you scanned the customer’s loyalty card. It was to the point that basically cashiers who wanted to optimize their numbers wouldn’t unlock the register until the customer had their loyalty card in hand.
This is the same grocery store chain that almost failed completely due to a impossible sales requirements in their meat department leading to redating meat and bleaching chicken to increase its shelf life. The company claims they never asked any of their meat departments to do anything like that, they just set impossible standards and held people accountable unless they were able to find a way to cheat.
I remember the grocery store I worked at started posting the rate for each cashier of items scanned per minute logged into a register. They didn’t say anything about it, but I now realize they were probably leading into using that data as justification for something.
My dumbass 16 year old self thought “I’m going to get that number so high it breaks the system.” I would lock my station after the previous customer, and take a little time to face all of the UPC codes and look up produce codes and make a general strategy. Then, I would unlock the register, scan like a madman, then lock it and casually start bagging. The customers would get concerned they needed to hurry up based on my fervor, so I would tell them “Take all the time you need, see that show yesterday?”
Next time they posted the rankings, my number was 20x as high as second place. After a few weeks of getting my number a little higher each time, my boss’ boss came by and told me to knock it off since I was polluting their metrics. Next week no new rankings.
I like to think I inadvertently helped prevent KPI nonsense.
That’s quite funny, would love to see it in action.
The grocery store I worked for, over 20 years ago, did something similar, with similar results. All it did was incentivize locking and unlocking the register as optimally as possible. They also tracked how often and when in the transaction you scanned the customer’s loyalty card. It was to the point that basically cashiers who wanted to optimize their numbers wouldn’t unlock the register until the customer had their loyalty card in hand.
This is the same grocery store chain that almost failed completely due to a impossible sales requirements in their meat department leading to redating meat and bleaching chicken to increase its shelf life. The company claims they never asked any of their meat departments to do anything like that, they just set impossible standards and held people accountable unless they were able to find a way to cheat.