Filed under: business, Leadership | Tags: cashier, elders, grandmother, grocery store, social psychology, women at work, working woman
When I called my Grandmother on her 90th birthday, she told me a story about her work life that I’d never heard before. She was telling me about how much she loved her job, how she had to start at 7am, which was hard but she didn’t care because she loved to go to work.
That job she loved was working as a cashier at Giant Supermarket. And the story she told me was that one day her manager came to her line and asked her to come to his office at the end of her shift. She was sure she was in trouble and was so nervous by the time she went to his office that she was crying. He apparently gave her a hug and told her she had nothing to cry about, he just wanted to ask her why all the customers wanted to go to her line. He wanted to know what she was doing right to bring the customers to her.
And the answer was that she knew everyone’s name and what was going on with them. If someone in the family was sick, she’d ask after them the next time she saw them. In short, my grandmother created relationships with everyone she met. She was curious about people and people responded. I’d be willing to bet that people went out of their way to get their groceries there so that they could check in with Darleen.
And her manager noticed. And the Giant Supermarket corporation noticed. I was at the retirement party that they threw for her and I remember lots of appreciation for her contributions to the store she worked in. I was a kid at the time so I don’t remember the details but I understood that a lot of strangers loved my grandmother almost as much as I did. Now I recognize how special that was and is. It is a kind of genius.
Now I understand that probably my grandmother is a bit of an anomaly. She is warm and friendly and quick to laugh and she made people feel at ease, even in the florescent lighting of an impersonal supermarket. The company did right to honor her.
But I also think the company missed an opportunity to grow. I mean, I read a LOT of social psychology and I have read so many stories about anomalous behavior that was then analyzed and developed to become a wildly successful large scale adaptation. I’ve heard so many stories about how one remarkable person’s behavior changed the whole culture of an organization.
From where I sit now, I think, as soon as the organization saw how successful my grandmother was, they should have started watching carefully. They should have asked her to teach her peers how to tap into their own social genius. They should have sent every cashier in the country through her line. I mean, can you imagine if every time you went to the supermarket the cashier, in addition to ringing up your groceries, also asked after your family, made you laugh, brightened your day somehow? You’d skip those automated cashier machines (“Item not recognized. Item not recognized.”) and go see your favorite cashier.
I feel like a lot of companies have understood the wrong part of what people like my grandmother brought to the table. They saw her smile so they think it’s about the smiling. She maybe told her customers to have a nice day so the suits think it’s about telling people to have a nice day. In my local supermarkets, I see the instructions to cashiers taped on their registers that say, “Smile at the customer. Tell them to have a nice day.” This categorically does not work. Anyone who is being compelled to smile is not likely to do it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cashier smile when there was one of those notes taped to their register. But ask my grandmother why she loved a job that many people (including me!) would find tedious and she says it was because she was curious about people. She genuinely wanted to know the people who came through her line.
You can’t mandate curiosity. You can’t mandate warmth. You can’t mandate connection.
But, my years in arts education have taught me that you can teach it. You just have to value it enough to take the time to cultivate it. I’m not saying you’re going to be able to replicate my grandmother entirely – she does have a kind of social genius that is uniquely hers – but imagine a whole flock of people who had learned from her. How much more often would you go to the store?
In our digital world this kind of human interaction becomes rarer and rarer. We buy our groceries on machines. We get everything delivered. But I think a smart business would lean into the possibilities of personal connections, would investigate the masters of that skill and watch their business grow instead of recede.
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