ustomers to turn online. Recently, one of my team shared an interesting experience they had shopping with a local retailer – a national chain and household name in women’s fashion. My colleague wanted to purchase several items from a particular range they offered, and thought to grab a bargain during a well-advertised sale. Unfortunately, when she contacted her local store she was told that the sale ended at the close of business and they would not hold the product so that she could purchase tomorrow at the sale price, and due to the fact that it was five minutes to close, they would also not allow a purchase over the phone on her credit card. She then went on to find similar items from an offshore retailer at a slightly cheaper price and purchased them; another sale lost to the evils of off shore retailing. As managers and owners we can’t control what the government does in terms of legislation and we can’t control what our offshore competitors do in regards to pricing. What we can do is make sure that we have a thorough understanding of the drivers of online retailing and which ones we can control and affect. In this case the barrier was accessibility and service. In regards to the former, in my store we have a very simple mantra; however the customer wants to pay for their goods we are happy to take payment. If they want to pay in Ethiopian birr we will take it, and exchange it later, if a customer wants to pay via credit card over the phone then we will sell to them via credit card over the phone. The internet allows our customers to purchase at anytime from anywhere with complete ease and in most cases we can’t keep our stores open 24/7 to match this. But we need to recognise all the ways our online competitors are beating us and adjust accordingly. In the example above the bricks and mortar retailer had a distinct advantage over online and still managed to get it wrong and lose the sale. A low margin sale on a Friday afternoon has no discernible difference to a low margin sale on a Saturday morning. An automated online retailer is unable to extend an offer on the fly; a shop assistant can, but for whatever reason decided in the example that declining a sale based on the date it would go through the till was a better solution. I’m not so sure any retailer is doing so well at the moment we can turn away a couple of hundred dollars in the till, yet this kind of experience is increasingly common. This exchange was naturally played out on social media and was viewable to several hundred friends, some of whom commented and re-posted the initial post, extending the audience to thousands. Yes, wages are a problem, not because they prevent us from being price competitive, but because in Australia we are paying top dollar (comparatively) for someone to cost us a sale and smear our brand all over the web. The fashion retailer started off with all of the advantages they could possibly have, and it had the one advantage we all have – the ability for the customer to ‘have it now’ and not wait for delivery. It had a comparable price while still theoretically able to offer service not available from its online competitor, and its marketing had attracted a customer, only to fall at the final hurdle when the human factor was introduced. So what are we doing in our stores? In the Harvard Management Update, 80 per cent of businesses claimed to deliver superior customer service, however, only eight per cent of customers agreed. Admittedly, this was not a survey of Australian retailers, but I imagine the basic premise would remain the same. Is it us, or is it our people that are causing this discrepancy? Ultimately our people are our responsibility – we are either unaware (our failing) or unwilling to act (also our failing). At the end of the day, whether we agree with high wages or not, we need to staff our stores. If wages are one of the highest complaints of retail businesses in regards to their competitiveness then we need to make sure we are doing our part by recruiting, retaining, and developing the best people available to us. It’s a very tight job market at the moment and nobody in retail has such a developed skill set that they can’t be replaced if they don’t inherently love serving your customers. I have no doubt this scenario could have occurred in a lot of stores around the country and the reasons for declining fortunes will be blamed squarely on factors that occur outside of our stores, but if we are honest with ourselves we know that there is always a bit more that we can control to regain some of our lost market share. We need to control our own destiny, before online controls it for us.