WaI vs. WaP: Supermarket Sweep Edition
I was recently shopping at my neighborhood grocery store and encountered yet another real example of the omnipresence of work-as-imagined versus work-as-performed.
With only 12 checkout lanes, this is a smaller store. It’s also a heavily trafficked store, sometimes causing long lines. So, any out-of-service lanes have a big customer and operational impact. (Navigating people waiting as the lines spill down the aisles can be… an adventure.)
Anyway, on this particular day, I’d put my credit card in the venerable customer-facing PIN pad; it beeped and asked me to sign. At this point, I noticed that the wire connecting the electron pen to the unit had been cut. The cashier noticed my confusion; “Oh, just use your finger,” he replied. I shrugged and tried signing my signature with my index finger, scrawling out something looking… nothing like it.
The cashier went on to explain: “Yeah, Corporate won’t send anyone out to fix units until 40% of them have a problem of some sort; when there are enough units that are broken, but it’s still less than 40%, we just ‘snip off’ some of the pens. They commonly get ripped off the units by accident anyway. Then they’ll schedule a tech to come out and fix ’em.”
I just stared at him for a moment… and then I started chuckling.
I’m sure it was completely rational to a faceless manager at the corporate office to limit the amount of money spent on sending technicians out to service units by decreeing broken units will be ignored, shuddering the checkout lane, as long as 6 in 10 in the store still worked.
And given that clerks and store managers have to face the annoyed customers who’ve just waited in long checkout lines, it obviously makes sense that they… might have opinions, shall we say, about getting these units serviced sooner.
But I’m willing to bet that the former never imagined the creative way in which the latter would go about getting the units they need to do their daily work fixed faster…
