On December 19, Portland department store Fillner’s achieved a goal it had sought for 50 years: The longest checkout line ever recorded – over 1.2 miles, with an average customer wait time of 7.5 days. Just a year earlier, the line was three blocks long and the wait only 5.9 hours.
So how did the store achieve such great success in just one year?
“We’d been trying everything from wrongly-marked price tags to system crashes every hour,” says CEO Marlene Willisinski. “But we couldn’t move the wait time above six hours.”
Finally, in October, she ordered her top managers to implement a new strategy so the company could finally meet the objective. It included:
- Calculating the lowest possible number of employees needed to meet the most minimal requirements of customer service, then reducing that by 75 percent.
- Conducting extensive sessions with remaining employees, training them to stop in the middle of every customer transaction for no apparent reason and walk away for a minimum of seven minutes, and to make or receive at least three personal calls during each transaction – at least one of which involves yelling or crying.
- Manipulating files to guarantee that at least 50 percent of all credit cards presented are not accepted the first time and must be swiped at least once again.
“We saw results almost immediately,” says Willisinski, “but we never imagined we’d be where we are after just three months.”
While she credits the company’s strategy with most of the success, she also acknowledges the contributions of Fillner’s customers.
“Whenever people see a line,” she says, “they feel obligated to get in it and wait.”
