Two stores, one Saturday afternoon in the Pearl. In the first, I asked whether a jacket came in a smaller size and the employee said, without lifting her eyes from her phone, that whatever is on the floor is what we have. In the second, forty minutes later, a guy named Dev spent nine minutes explaining why the more expensive bag was wrong for what I had described wanting, and then sold me the cheaper one.
I have thought about Dev all week. I thought about the jacket store as long as it took to walk out.
Both companies have a brand platform. I would bet real money both have a deck with the word authentic on slide four.
The last three feet of your brand are performed by a person on retail wages who has never seen your platform and was never going to.
Run the arithmetic nobody runs. A regional chain with forty stores might have four hundred people on the floor in a given week. Thirty meaningful interactions per shift each and you have a reach number your paid social team would envy, delivered face to face, with attention no feed can buy. You paid an agency for a year to define tone of voice. You then handed delivery of that tone to people you trained for two hours on the point of sale system and nothing else.
So do three things, in this order. One, translate the platform into behavior. Not adjectives, behaviors. Salt & Straw does not tell staff to be generous, they put a spoon of something weird in your hand before you ask, every time, and the generosity is a procedure. Two, pay for it and staff for it, because warmth is structurally impossible at ninety seconds a customer. Three, measure the thing you claim to care about, which is whether people came back, not whether the line moved.
The objection is always cost. Fine. Price the alternative. You spent a year teaching me a story about your brand and one bored employee unspent it in eleven seconds. That is your most expensive media buy, running unsupervised.
Dev cost that store margin and bought them a customer. The jacket store protected margin and bought nothing.
Salt & Straw does not tell staff to be generous, they put a spoon of something weird in your hand before you ask, every time, and the generosity is a procedure.
Thursday I sang at the karaoke bar in Southeast, the sticky-floored one where the host calls everyone baby. I was bad. He introduced me like I was headlining a festival anyway, and the room clapped for a stranger who deserved none of it. That is a trained behavior too, and it is why the place is full on a weeknight. Somebody decided how that room is supposed to feel and then made it an actual person's actual job.