I was reminiscing about my first interaction with an American customer I had when I had just started working (I don’t live in America, she was a tourist or something.) I worked in retail, and was taking care of a long line of customers. This American lady was at the end of the line. When she gets to me she asks to see my boss, so I head back and tell my boss a customer wants to talk to him, while I turn to some other work in the back of the store. A few minutes later my boss comes back and says the lady was upset with me and my behaviour, because I had not greeted her as she entered the store (because I was busy helping another customer.) The situation has perplexed me ever since, do all American stores employ greeters? I’m aware of the concept, how big stores like Walmart employ people to stand at the front door and greet people. But is it like that for every store in America?
No, the vast majority never did that and now most American Stores barely have enough staff to run the registers.
Lol same here in the UK. If you go into the big supermarket chains like Tesco, Sainsburys and Asda, there are sometimes a whole bunch of registers but only 1 or 2 of them have a human working on them. The rest just sit there as a reminder that human jobs are being replaced by self checkouts.
Even where I work, our company does absolutely anything it can to avoid having to pay people, so we’re often understaffed and overworked.
Tangent over 😅
The most absurd part is the stores haven’t done anything to embrace self checkout. They have not changed the carts to help the checkout process, they have not decreased the number of unused registers, and many of them have not even made the self checkout area bigger.
In the states we have a big box hardware store called Home Depot and they really have done a great job with the self checkout process. I have not been in a single grocery store that has.
No, that customer is a cunt.
No, it’s pretty atypical. There’s Walmart (as you mention) and a few others but more often, somebody stationed at an entrance/exit is security, a receipt checker (less common), or a cart-wrangler.
Sounds like you met one of our distressingly many entitled weirdos. Sorry about that.
‘greeters’ are also part of security or ‘loss prevention’, even the old guy who can’t stand-up during his shift and needs to sit on a stool at his post.
No, most stores do not have greeters in the United States. You encountered a “Karen”, a rude entitled American woman. There are so many of them in the US now. I used to love my country but every day I despise the bulk of the US population more and more. There are so many uneducated self-important assholes here now.
More often than not, retail workers behind the counter in smaller stores are required (by their employer) to greet customers as they enter. It’s a tactic to reduce theft. However, employees hate doing it. Most customers understand its a mandatory part of their routine and hate it, or at the least are indifferent. It’s an insincere greeting that nobody cares for, its just something employees have to do, or they get reprimanded.
Your customer encounter is not normal American behavior. Expecting to be greeted is a sign of entitlement (which is the likely case, due to asking for your manager) or possibly mental health.
I had to scroll too far for this. 100% accurate Oka!
Was she expecting
“Welcome to Costco, I love you”?
No; in fact, most don’t. Walmart is generally the exception, not the rule. And as much as people (myself included) like to shit on Walmart, if you actually look at the greeters, they’re people who generally would not work out in any other position. So why are they there? If they weren’t, they probably would not have a job.
There’s another concept at play, though. In stores that do not have a greeter who stands at the door, a lot of places that pride themselves on customer service and community will have front-end staff call out to new customers to greet them. This practice is far more popular. Heck, we used to have an ice creamery that would have the entire staff sing if you put a dollar (or more) in their tip jar. Cold Stone Creamery, there might be a few of them around, but they used to be everywhere. Like Subway, Quiznos, and more. You might still know where one or two are, but you used to know where a lot more of them were.
Anyway, it’s weird that an American visiting abroad would be upset that she was not greeted upon entering the store.
No. A typical “supermarket” (grocery + clothes, housewares, etc.) does not, nor do smaller stores that are mostly just grocery. Walmart is an exception.
Costco has people who could be called greeters, but they are just checking that you, or someone you are with, has a paid membership. Some stores have security guards at the entrances, but that’s a different thing.
Other than Walmart and stores that have memberships like Costco, there aren’t really designated greeters. That being said, when I worked for a gas station, the area manager, the person over a couple dozen stores in our part of the state, mandated that we all give some sort of greeting to every customer that comes through the doors. This is because, as middle management, she had nothing better to do than read google reviews of every store and make sweeping mandates based upon them. Obviously, we ignored her and continued greeting almost nobody. So, there are some crotchety people that will complain about anything.
Welcome to Moe’s!
The number of times I wanted to go get a burrito for lunch (Moe’s was next door to my office building) but went hungry instead solely because I did not want to hear “WELCOME TO MOE’S!” is very non-zero.
No, and the funny thing is the purpose of the greeter (at least at this stage) is to lower the chances of shoplifting
No, Walmart is kind of an outlier by having a greeter. In other places that have a “greeter” it’s usually an extra layer of security/theft prevention, or it’s a place like Costco where you need a membership to shop there. That said, it’s basically standard for an employee to seek you out and ask if you would like help finding anything fairly soon after you walk in the store. It’s generally seen as good customer service, and in larger stores it’s not uncommon to be approached by several employees asking if you’d like help finding what you’re looking for over the course of your time in the store.
American customer service culture tends to be a little extra. There’s a premium on going the extra mile that’s tied into America’s self-image of the “land of opportunity,” and the hustle culture that goes with that. But when that’s what you’re accustomed to dealing with, the customer service cultures of other countries can be kind of jarring. I know from my own travels through Europe that shopping in some countries can range from feeling cold and indifferent, to feeling actively hostile.
That said, most Americans wouldn’t think of complaining to your manager about it. It’s only a specific kind of over-entitled asshole that does that. Sounds like you had a real karen on your hands.
A ton of stores do this in the US, but I’ve never once found myself been upset that someone didn’t greet me. That person sounds bat shit insane
Not by a long shot. It’s mainly just Walmart. There are others, but they’re the exception, not the rule.
I worked in retail for about ten years. The company I was at did make a big deal about making a customer feel welcome, which might incidentally involve greeting a customer at the door, but we certainly were too busy to have someone perpetually posted up at the door like Walmart. Any sort of “greeting” we might have done would be the same as I what I experienced in Ireland or Italian retail where if I was approaching an employee, I’d get the local version of “hello”. Didn’t strike me as being very different.
So, no, the American retail space that has a dedicated greeter is fairly uncommon.
There are two types.
Greeters are typically someone staged at the door. They typically tend to be elderly, and often during Christmas season and sometimes longer. It serves two functions, being welcoming to customers and being a presence to thwart petty shoplifting. It obviously doesn’t stop someone committed but enough to make some think twice or choose a different exit.
The second type is just your average floor employee. This has become less common over the years with modern systems cutting back hours and shifts during the day. Back in the 90’s in my previous experience, we were expected to great EVERY CUSTOMER with a smile and a few words. Even offer to guide them to what they’re looking for. There were secret shoppers testing or observing and you’re get reprimanded for not doing it. Most customers appreciated the gesture but every once in a while you would experience a power tripping Karen/Ken being awful.
Dude we don’t even have greeters at the stores that actually did have greeters in the past anymore. Walmart hasn’t had dedicated greeters in years.
I honestly did not realize Walmart ever had greeters. They’ve always had someone at the entrance/exit. But they just check my receipt to make sure I didn’t shoplift. I didn’t realize anyone acted as greeters there. Is it the same people checking your receipt for shoplifting or no?
Also, in case OP wants to know…most stores do NOT have receipt-checkers at the exit, either. It’s just that Walmart does because it’s a store that is prone to shoplifting.
It was a thing when I was a kid. They would hire an elderly or mentally handicapped person to stand at the entrance and say hi to everyone. They got good PR for giving a job to someone “in need”. But the real reason was that they found that simply having someone say hi to you when you walk in the door made people feel seen, and therefore, made them less likely to shoplift.
Fun fact, you don’t have to waste your time showing them your receipt. They cannot force you to do that. If you have it and just walk past them, you have nothing to worry about.
They used to pride themselves on the fact they hired senior citizens to stand at the entrance and greet people for minimum wage. Personally, I only ever started seeing the reciept checkers in stores other than Costco when self-checkout became a thing. And they do it at a lot of major retailers like Walmart and Target. Not so much things like Dollar General (who doesnt even hire enough staff to actually stock their freaking shelves) or local small shops.
That’s because Dollar General and anything with so much as to have ‘Dollar’ in their store’s name or function like one, expects you to be a swiss-army knife of an employee while still getting shit pay and benefits.
Lmao so I worked at a Dollar Tree for a few months before. Shit was wild. You were expected to check out customers, stock shelves, and put away “go backs” (items that customers didn’t want) on the shelves all concurrently. Because there was never anyone working in the store bahaha
