"Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For Today?"

Our local Giant has been on a bit of a customer service kick these last few months; I can only presume the manager has instituted this practice.  Each time I use a checkout manned by a cashier, the cashier asks, "Did you find everything you were looking for today?"

I don't remember them doing this in years past, and on the face of it, it's fine.  An innocuous question, really, designed to make the customer think that someone in the store cares whether they met all their shopping requirements.  Today, however, came a new wrinkle: On pushing my cart out into the parking lot to load groceries for the trip home, I came across one of the cartherds bringing empty carts together in the corral.  He asked me the same exact question: did I find everything I was looking for today?

I can appreciate a manager wanting his entire staff to be familiar with the phrase, and to deploy it liberally, to improve customer perceptions and general satisfaction.  But there's got to be some line beyond which it's not only unwarranted, but serves to show that it's not a heartfelt question.

Take my poor teenage cartherd this morning.  At the point at which he's interacting with me, I am not only past the point of paying for my groceries, I have wheeled them out of the store, down through the mall, out the door, across the parking lot, and loaded them into my car--returning the empty cart is the only thing left between me and leaving Giant completely.  Is it seriously thought that, by his asking me if I found everything I was looking for today, after all that physical and psychological space between me and their shelves, that I would suddenly stop and say, "You know, I had really wanted to find some left-handed kumquats, but was just too self-conscious to admit I couldn't find them; do you think you could walk me back into the store and show me where they are?"

I would argue that the same applies, but to a lesser extent admittedly, to the cashiers.  Their use of the line would actually mean something, since I haven't paid yet and could theoretically go grab those left-handed kumquats.  My biggest gripe about the line as delivered by the cashiers is that it's meaningless to me when there are three other people with full baskets in line behind me.  If it's slow and I'm alone, I might confess I'm missing the kumquats.  I'm not going to hold others up to admit, at that late hour, that I cannot find the kumquat aisle to save my life.  If anything, the question and its response have become not just automatic but autonomic: I can't say there's a whole lot of conscious thought that goes into my instant reply of "Yes, thanks."

If the line is to work, to truly have value, it should be the first or second thing the stock-persons and floor managers ask of folks while they're shopping.  "Can I help you find something?" is a common enough line from the stock-persons refilling the shelves, and they're great at dropping what they're doing to walk me to the kumquat aisle.  As an adjunct, "Are you finding everything you're looking for today?" makes a great question from the people in the aisles actually helping when purchasing decisions are being made.  Any later than that, it runs too great a risk of coming off like a forced management slogan rather than a genuine offer of help.