Then we still had a checkout line while we were there
Posted: Sat Dec 21, 2024 3:43 am
So I thought that's ridiculous. Why do we make people check out? Because we would find that when we put people in the checkout line, they would just leave. They would have what was called a dropped cart. And we started to make everybody a checkout line. So we'd give them these little PC things. And it was funny because they ran on Pocket PC at the time. And we'd always say, "Oh, sorry, that's a Windows problem," if it'd ever screw up. But, basically, we would turn everybody into a checkout line. We mounted receipt printers underneath desks, so you didn't have to leave. And that helped get people to checkout faster, and everybody was mexico phone number search happier. And then the last piece was, which is probably my favorite, is that people would stick around in the store too long, meaning that when you would buy $600 worth of something, you more than likely didn't have another $600 to spend. But you wanted to hang around and play with all the toys, but that would just make it more of a cluster in there, and people would get intimidated to walk in. So we started to walk toward the front to signal, hey, maybe you should leave.
And we would kind of use the stuff you just bought, as you can almost say, like a treat of sorts. And we would hand it to you when you got close enough to the front door, and out the front door, you would walk. So that started to make stores look a little bit more empty, people less intimidated to walk in. And I got to deploy that in about 300 stores-plus worldwide, which was really exciting. And a lot of people still do this to this, they all still use that system to this day except now we have iPads and iPhones and other cool things.
CAROLINE: That's amazing.
RYAN: Right? And it was fun because I got to work directly with Ron Johnson. Ron Johnson was the ex-CEO of Target. He's the reason that Targets are really cool and not really awful. A lot of people don't remember that Target used to be really bad.
CAROLINE: Oh really?
RYAN: And then Ron came along. Oh yeah, Target was like a dingy, dark place. It was like a Walmart minus, right? Some other things.
CAROLINE: That's crazy.
RYAN: Yeah, everybody forgets that. And he came in, deleted half the aisles, marked up the prices by 30%, and made really bright lights. And that's what you know today. You know that Target is the nice place to go. And it's brilliant. Yeah, they were really struggling at one point in time, and he really flipped that around.
And we would kind of use the stuff you just bought, as you can almost say, like a treat of sorts. And we would hand it to you when you got close enough to the front door, and out the front door, you would walk. So that started to make stores look a little bit more empty, people less intimidated to walk in. And I got to deploy that in about 300 stores-plus worldwide, which was really exciting. And a lot of people still do this to this, they all still use that system to this day except now we have iPads and iPhones and other cool things.
CAROLINE: That's amazing.
RYAN: Right? And it was fun because I got to work directly with Ron Johnson. Ron Johnson was the ex-CEO of Target. He's the reason that Targets are really cool and not really awful. A lot of people don't remember that Target used to be really bad.
CAROLINE: Oh really?
RYAN: And then Ron came along. Oh yeah, Target was like a dingy, dark place. It was like a Walmart minus, right? Some other things.
CAROLINE: That's crazy.
RYAN: Yeah, everybody forgets that. And he came in, deleted half the aisles, marked up the prices by 30%, and made really bright lights. And that's what you know today. You know that Target is the nice place to go. And it's brilliant. Yeah, they were really struggling at one point in time, and he really flipped that around.