Times Must Be Hard at Niketown
3 weeks ago I went in to Niketown in San Francisco to buy a new pair of running shoes – in a desperate bid to motivate myself i’ve bought one of those Nike Plus gadgets that plugs into my iPod.
I can’t stand running, but it is the only thing that makes a difference to my fitness levels (don’t suggest eating less junk!!!!!), so I thought that injecting a new gadget into the equation I may notice the running aspect a bit less.
Anyway – I gave up in Niketown SF as there were far too few sales assistants for the number of people wanting to try or buy something. So, I went in to the London one today, and guess what……far too few sales assistants for the number of people trying and buying.
This time I persevered, because I figured that as it is a Nike specific gadget I was buying, if anything went wrong i’d get better advice or service from Nike themselves. So, after ten minutes hanging around looking as if I wanted to buy something, a sales guy finally wandered over and that part of things went fine – I decided to buy a pair for about £65 (they would have been much cheaper in SF!!!!).
I then went to pay for them, guess what – 7 people in front of me at the payment desk and only two tills open.
So Nike – what am I missing? With the amount of people in buying you must be coining in the money – so what’s wrong with spending some of it to stop your customers having to hang around and waste time? Is it poor management, deliberate cost cutting, or deliberately hoping if we have to hang around we’ll buy more stuff. I’m voting for poor management ……
In gthe next installment……did the new shoes and gadget make any difference?
Thing is, as long as all of its competitors give equally poor service they won’t lose customers. Anyway, I’ve just bought a Nike plus seonsor too, fancy a challenge against me? Email me if you do
Yup – now you come to mention it, i’ve not seen any high street retailer without this same issue.