The Real Worry: What if the Back Room Employees Came out Front?
A blue-ribbon panel of behavioral scientists convened by the National Academy of Profound Issues has concluded that Wal-Mart customers are scarier than Wal-Mart employees.
“It is our profound finding that Wal-Mart’s customers are somewhat scarier than a typical cross-section of the company’s employees, as long as the employees studied are confined to those who work in the store’s public spaces and stockroom and behind-the-scenes employees are excluded,” said an executive summary of the two-year study.
But the study’s authors said that if the stockroom and behind-the-scenes employees are included, “Wal-Mart employees become just as scary, if not more so, than the stores’ customers.”
The question of customer versus employee scariness had been a long-running discussion point among Wall Street analysts who ponder how Wal-Mart has been able to turn itself in a retail sales behemoth, considering the scary nature of both customers and store employees.
The Academy’s study did not address the question of whether or not scary — or not so scary — employees accounts for Wal-Mart’s decades long ascension to the world’s largest retailer.
Exploring the Synergy of Scary Employee Versus Scary Customer
“This is the problem with blue-ribbon panels, they study and study and in the end they don’t answer the core questions,” said Waldo Martin, a Wall Street securities analyst who follows retailers. “What all of us who marvel at Wal-Mart’s success want to know is whether some kind of mysterious synergy between scary store employees and equally scary customers is the secret ingredient.”
Martin said that over the years he has become convinced that there is a synergy. “Scary people looking to buy things go to a place where the sales people look like them,” he explained. “You won’t see the Wal-Mart lady who tends blue jeans in East Orange suddenly turn up at Prada in New York city selling jeans.”
Martin said that he has devised a private scariness rating system and twice a year he makes a swing across the United States and pops into Wal-Mart stores conducts his own study of employee versus customer scariness.
“Believe me, if I ever return from one of these trips with evidence that the scariness quotient has lessened for either sales people or customers, I’ll put a ’sell’ on the stock so fast your eyeballs will spin,” Martin said. “Scary begets scary and that begets big profits. Wal-Mart needs to keep it that way.”