AbubaEssay Preview: AbubaReport this essayAvis Walton is used to being told where to go and what to do once he gets there. As a “picker” for 99 Cents Only Stores, Walton spends his 5 a.m.-to-3:30 p.m. shift cruising around a 750,000-square-foot distribution center in Katy, Texas, in an electric cart responding to a stream of spoken instructions. “Go to row 12, section 8, bin 31,” an authoritative womans voice in his ear commands, and Walton zips to row 12. Blip-blip. He scans the bin tag with a wireless handheld computer to confirm hes arrived at the right place. “Pick two cases plus four items,” the voice continues. Beginning to break a sweat, 24-year-old Walton lifts two cases of vinyl tablecloths onto a pallet, rips open a third box and removes four more tablecloths. “Confirm pick,” he says into his microphone, thus prompting the voice to send him zipping off on another assignment. Doesnt her bossiness get annoying? “Nah, shes cool,” Walton says. “She tells me what to do and I tell her when I do it.”
Perhaps if this voice were that of a human, Walton might take offense. But the “she” that he and his 15 fellow pickers interact with throughout their shifts is actually the computer-generated voice of the distribution centers warehouse-management software. Like a digital flight controller, the as-yet-unnamed voice sends squads of pickers scurrying to gather the items needed by individual stores, all the while quietly calculating the most efficient routes that will also prevent them crashing into one another. At the same time, the voice tells the pickers which bins need replenishment and where they can find the stock to do so. Roaring away overhead is a mechanized conveyor system worthy of any airports luggage- handling operation. Pickers run along four levels of a massive series of racks, each shoving cases of product into the conveyor system; laser scanners read box tags to verify that each case is following the correct path to the waiting pallets below.
Powell, on this issue, points out that:
“The problem of ‘hiding and going back’ is pervasive in the distribution center business—it exists to a wide range of services across every large retail store. As retailers add other systems to their systems, their business continues to grow for several more years. Because they are trying to stay ahead of this increasing competition, they seek to reduce friction. Thus do the people who own each store, and they make the best of it. However, with a lot of changing the pace, there is only so much one store can do. In fact, there is no way a store can have so many people on a business plan. If this was a city and an all-time great many had been working together, then we would not be doing this. All in all, this is a huge challenge. For every store that has to close, the number of people who can fit in all of their people in a single space will increase, and each store will have to maintain a single large, integrated space. As a result, the ratio [located in store spaces] will increase.”
The power of the voice and the need to avoid it has helped drive a growing number of stores nationwide, and the lack of consistency among them has driven some to close their stores. However, according to Nielsen, the voice of Walmart’s customer-driven sales strategy is “growing steadily” as stores close down to create more opportunities. Walmart’s ability to do this has been critical for Walmart and its customers to stay relevant and loyal and provide shoppers with the top brands and products.
For all these reasons, the voice of Walmart and other retail stores that have been forced to close down following the rise of digital and mobile data use and the demand for those brands and products is an important feature that we see in other retail companies; especially at low- and mid-frequency (LP) retail.
The voice of Walmart on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter is at least as important as the voices of Amazon’s online services; for instance, as Twitter has become more “mobile”. And, because of this, the voice of the customers on Facebook as of May is as much in jeopardy as the voice in the company.
Will there be more stores closing and no one will listen to them? What do you think?