Come On Down
When I was a kid, there were four tiers of retailers.Tier one, the bottom of the barrel, was K-Mart (and maybe Woolco, if anyone remembers them). K-Mart was ultra-discount, the kind of place you went if you only cared about price.
Tier two was Sears. It had lost some luster by then, but it was still a quality option, especially for appliances and tools. You didn't want to buy clothes there, though. Ever.
Tier three was J.C. Penney. This was a "nice" store, upmarket for the middle class. This is a store you went to when quality mattered. Also a respectable place to buy clothes.
Tier four consisted of stores that were too upscale for the area I lived in. Well, Dillard's might have been in tier four, and there was one of those in the nearest mall. Dillard's, though, was considered unnecessary, because you could get everything they had at Penney's, and for much less.
That was retail back in 1970, when I was nine years old.
Today, I needed a little throw blanket, so I went to the mall. I buy everything I can from Amazon, but if I need to touch or feel a product, I still go to the mall.
There's a Macy's at this mall, and a Penney's, too. Macy's is tier three now, what Penney's used to be. Penney's meanwhile, is tier three, barely.
After poking around for a while in an inventoried ghost town, I found a blanket for "65% off". Off what is anyone's guess.
I went to check out.
This was upstairs, and I walked around for ten minutes and not only couldn't find any employees, I couldn't even find a register.
A novel approach for a retail store.
I went downstairs and found two registers. Two. I said to the clerk, "You appear to have eliminated both employees and registers as a cost-cutting measure."
She laughed. "Were you upstairs?" she asked.
"I was."
"We don't have anyone up there during the day. We just put up signs that say come on down. We have a person up there at night."
A person.
This is not a small store, by any means. It's a healthy walk from end to end. But that walk will not be taken by employees.
Well, one employee. At night.
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