The Ice Cream Maker: An Inspiring Tale About Making Quality The Key Ingredient in Everything You Do by Subir Chowdhury

Author:Subir Chowdhury
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2005-10-03T14:00:00+00:00

“What a great idea,” I said. “There’s nothing I hate more than waiting in line.”

“The idea was Margot’s,” he said, introducing her to me. “She saw the problem develop every day at her station.”

At Mike’s invitation, Margot explained how she had spearheaded their strategy to cut down on the cashier lines.

“Last year, I went out to Las Vegas for the first time,” Margot said. “I had a great time, won a few dollars. But most important, I learned a lot about business. When you’re in Vegas, you never, ever, have to wait for a slot machine or a blackjack table. They always have one open for you. If the crowd at a certain time requires ten tables, they always seem to have twelve dealers ready. So I asked one of the pit bosses about it. He said, ‘Why should we make you wait to wager your money?’ Made sense to me. You may love Vegas, or hate it, but you can’t deny that they are the kings of customer service.”

“Imagine what Vegas would be like if it was run by the Department of Motor Vehicles!” Mike said. “You’d never go back.”

“Sad, but true,” Margot said. “Anyway, at one of our meetings the week after I came back from Vegas, I thought, why should we make our customers wait to buy our products, to give us their money? Seems to me we should be eager to let them pay us, not make them wait. It’s not only a source of irritation to them, it’s just plain stupid for us. We work so hard to get them in the store and provide the things they want. Why should we undermine the process at the point of payoff?

“I realized that, like the casinos, we should always have extra cashiers ready. We should never make our customers wait to give us their money. Everyone on our team agreed. So we doubled the number of checkout lines to ten—then doubled it again to twenty! And someone suggested that we angle them to make them seem less obtrusive, and take up less space. And thanks to another suggestion by one of our teammates, we put the checkout lines at the far end of the front window, so people didn’t see them when they came in. Instead, they walk into a dazzling array of our produce and products. On top of that, they now walk past more of our products to get to the checkout lines. The extra items they pick up en route have more than paid for the changes we made.

“And finally, we assigned one clerk to each of our twenty checkout lines in order to keep customers moving.”

“But with your new system, don’t you have a lot of clerks waiting around much of the time?” I asked.

“Take a look for yourself,” she said, turning to the lines. “We have eight checkout clerks at their stations—it’s two in the afternoon, not a particularly busy time for us—and six of the eight have customers. We decided to always have two more lanes open than we need—like the blackjack tables in Vegas.

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