Retailers Revamp Staffing as Fewer Shoppers Visit Stores
Foot traffic on Black Friday fell 6.2%; Target and others use store workers to handle online orders .
By Sarah Nassauer | Photographs by Jackson Krule for The Wall Street Journal
Dec. 1, 2019 11:00 am ET
At a Target store in Brooklyn, stacks of televisions and toys awaited the rush of the weekend’s holiday shoppers. Hours after the store opened, it was calm. More frantic were the Target workers pushing carts through aisles to collect products ordered online by shoppers for home delivery or for pickup at the store.
Retailers are racing to adapt to a world where shopper behavior is changing and competition for online spending is fierce. Target Corp., Walmart Inc. and other retailers are staffing stores differently in an effort to meet new competitive challenges, as well as attract workers and control payroll costs amid the tightest labor market in decades. Early data show that online shopping will once again account for a larger percentage of total holiday sales compared with previous years. Foot traffic to U.S. stores fell about 6.2% on Black Friday, as more people ordered online or went to stores on Thanksgiving Day, when visits increased 2.3%, according to ShopperTrak, which uses cameras to count traffic in a range of U.S. stores.
Some chains, including Target, Walmart and Best Buy Co. , have posted strong sales in recent years by adapting to the shift to online shopping. They use their stores to handle deliveries or convince shoppers to pick up orders rather than wait for an Amazon.com Inc. package. Target said it now sources 80% of its online orders from stores, not warehouses. At the Brooklyn store around 80 workers handle internet orders, collecting products from shelves or putting items into boxes in the backroom for delivery.
Target retrained the bulk of its 300,000 year-round U.S. workers over the past year, giving them new titles and responsibilities. The Minneapolis, Minn.-based retailer hopes to mold each into an expert for a specific area of the store such as the beauty department, toys or online fulfillment to offer better customer service and use labor spending more efficiently.
After poor sales in 2017 prompted a new plan to invest in stores, Target executives also decided to revamp the staffing strategy, Chief Operating Officer John Mulligan said in an interview. Internal shopper surveys showed low scores for customers in need of assistance, Mr. Mulligan said. At the same time, Target wasn’t providing fast, consistent service when shoppers ordered online for home delivery or pickup in stores, he said.
Under the new staffing system, more workers are responsible for the full chain of tasks needed to keep their department well stocked and shoppers happy, including finding products in the backroom and stocking shelves, tracking inventory and answering shoppers’ questions. Target added technology on hand-held electronic devices to guide workers through the store more efficiently to gather or send out online orders. And more workers are putting products on shelves during the day, not at night, to be able to help customers at the same time. Target has also promised to raise the minimum hourly wage it pays store workers to $15 by next year.
“It’s like running a little business now,” said Kevin Lopez, a 21-year-old sales associate responsible for the toy department at a Target in Queens, N.Y. Ahead of the release of the “Frozen 2” movie in November, Mr. Lopez asked his store manager for extra space to stock toys related to the movie, trying to grab more sales. “I feel like I’m more in control of my department,” he said. Some workers have found the change overwhelming. “They want every employee to be doing everything and so it’s making it so nothing gets fully done,” said a 21-year-old staffer in a Texas Target. Others complained to managers when the new system made their existing work shift unavailable. “Change is hard, even the fact that we made the change over a period of several years,” Mr. Mulligan said.
Target is increasing market share in beauty and other areas in which it now has more dedicated staff trained to give product advice. In 250 stores that tested the new employee structure last year, sales increased faster than the chain-wide average, a spokesman said.
The new staffing system will be stress-tested during the holiday shopping rush for the first time this year. “For this to be a Black Friday and it to be this calm in store, it says a lot about the role of technology today,” said Daniel Murreld, a 29-year-old employee at the Target Brooklyn store who has worked in retail much of the past decade. On Black Friday morning, a line of shoppers waited to pick up online orders at the front of the Brooklyn store. A family considered buying a microwave offered at a discount, but one of the younger members of the group chimed in, “No. Let’s order it online.”
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