Is Politics Driving Idiotic Self-Checkout Laws?

As I have posted before over on the SV Foodies blog, I like self checkout. I'm one of those customers who really doesn't want to chat in line. I find the self checkout UI interesting. And most of the time, I can get in and through the line faster in self checkout. But as of January 1, some new laws took effect that have handicapped the convenience of self checkout, made me question the logic of the law's sponsors, and also sparked this post.

Perhaps, like me, you only learned about the law banning the sale of alcohol at self-checkouts right before it went into effect around the beginning of the year. At the time, I remember thinking to myself that this is one of the dumbest laws that I've seen. Mind you, back in the Bible-belt South, it's not unusual for the 'morally minded' to use stupid laws to drive their cultural agenda, but few California residents can probably image a state with 'dry counties' or limiting alcoholic beverage sales on Sunday. So when I was signs announcing that this new restriction was taking effect, I assumed that it was legislation crafted by some misdirected, morally minded, overprotective technophobe. It turns out I was wrong.

Unexpected Item In Bagging Area
Anyone who has struggled with a self checkout system knows that the experience has the potential to be extremely frustrating. Self checkout systems freak out all of the time. Anyone who has used one of the systems is probably familiar with the "unexpected item" siren. Self checkout systems don't allow you to ignore store rules; instead, they get caught up on more exceptions than any human checker. If a price doesn't scan, human staff often simply key the item in as a generic grocery item and move forward. Self check out triggers the alert sirens and leaves you standing around waiting for a clerk to reset the system while you fidget about with people thinking that you were trying to steal from the store. Or that you just suck at using simple electronics.

This is why most of us who have used self checkout know that "the purpose of this law is to block an access point for underage drinkers to alcohol" is complete and utter bullshit.

I have three rules which I followed (prior to this law):

1. Avoid purchasing alcohol unless there is a clerk nearby and I am don't mind waiting
2. Avoid purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables and particularly things that might require the clerk
3. Avoid using self checkout on the weekends when families with kids or inexperienced users decide to 'try the system out'

The Engine Behind This BS
As I noted earlier, this legislation went complete under the radar for me as I imagine that it did for most of us. In the past, you might have expected this type of law to be the result of a real life incident -- people dying from taking an over-the-counter 'weight loss substance' or something -- so when I did some research and turned over the rock on the self checkout law, I was surprised when I didn't find something like that. Instead, this one seems like another example of lobbying interests driving legislation for special interests with little regard for the society at large.

First a couple of links so that you can see the history:

• California bill banning alcohol sales at self-checkout stands advances from the LA Times
• Gov. Signs AB 183: End of Self-Service Checkout Only in California For Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market if Stores to Still Sell Alcohol is an interesting one from the Fresh & Easy Buzz blog which claims to be unaffiliated with the Fresh & Easy stores.

Some noteworthy aspects that I learned from these pieces:

• This wasn't the first attempt to push this legislation through. There were also attempts in 2008 and 2010.
• It appears that the bill was driven largely by the United Food and Commercial Workers.
• Fresh and Easy is all self checkout and often targets food deserts -- I may have to check one out
• As governor, Schwarzenegger shot this bill down saying, "It is unclear what problem this bill seeks to address." That means that Brown signed off on this, and I really would have expected better from him. While I don't think that this would be a deal breaker in terms of me voting for him, given the opportunity to confront him on the issue, I would ask for an explanation. 
• California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma, the Democrats in the Assembly that voted for this law, and Governor Brown all get nominated for my anti-innovation award for the year. What next? Do I need to card everyone that I charge on Square because it might be an alcohol purchase? Do I need to have a UFCW cashier ring up the transaction?

While the anti-innovation forces want to stifle self-checkout, What they overlook is that consumers like using these systems. Sure, sometimes it's slower, but it eliminates other potential frustrations in the transaction process, frustrations often created by poor customer service models. When a checker at Safeway asks about my day, am I really supposed to believe that they have any more interest in my day than the other ten people in line behind me? And if I'm number eight in line, do I really benefit from the "personalized" service that that person is receiving? For that matter, at Walmart or Target where they collect a ton of personal data and probably could access all of your personal transaction records in order to change your 'checkout' experience, would 'personalizing' it make you feel more connected to the big box store -- or just creeped out?

Piling On: How San Jose's Bag Ordinance Is Impacting Self Checkout
While San Jose probably was more focused on the environmental impact of plastic bags, the no bag ordinance is a blow to self checkout systems. Similar to the system's inability to correctly handle paper bags, the delicate scales on these systems aren't designed to calibrate to a customer-supplied bag. This means stacking and bagging after the transaction and, in most cases, an overall slow-down in processing a self checkout transaction. It will be interesting to see how stores handle no bags and the self checkout systems going forward as San Jose is probably not the last city to push a no bags ordinance through.

2 Hours From Awesome

Often, when I'm contacted by someone that I haven't talked with in a long time, they will ask me whether I still play guitar or whether I've been riding lately. Thinking about it this morning, I realized that there are a bunch of things like guitar that I probably have 9,998 hours at.

Perhaps you know the feeling. One day, when I get some time, I will devote some more time to it, focus on it, and finally cross that expertise finish line. Hell, if it were just one hour a way, I'd probably pull out that guitar right now. But it's not just an hour. It's not just one more turn to level up. So I should probably focus on something else. Besides, that next hour will probably be awkward.

Salesforce.com Customer Support: Round 2 - FAIL

So I spent the better part of this last week playing phone and email tag with Salesforce.com customer support. As noted in my previous post, Salesforce.com Customer Service: Transforming Strategic Service Tiers Into Service That Sucks, I started the week with an issue and since that time I have learned the following:

• Salesforce.com's standard tier of customer support has been outsourced.
• Salesforce.com standard tier customer support is happy to work with you during their business hours which generally seem to run from about 7:45am to 5:00pm CST -- kind of funny when you consider that both Salesforce and I are located in the San Francisco Bay Area (that's 5:45am -3:00pm PST for you math challenged kids at home). What happened to working with the customer as though you were within their time zone? Or at least having customer service people who understood what time zone you were in?
• If two cases are created and you receive a response from two different customer service people, simply using a cloud-based platform for service and support doesn't mean that they will consolidate your case, give you one contact point, or solve the issue using 'the wisdom of crowds'. Twice the fail, Slow and Slower response.
• When your end solution is to direct your customer back to their account rep that created the case for help, you have probably failed.  

As I mentioned in my previous post, once upon a time Salesforce.com support wasn't this crappy. It used to be that when you called customer support, you felt like you were talking to someone working in a Bay Area office who probably had as much expertise with the platform (and with the various technology interconnects) as you did -- probably more. During this round, I have found myself dealing with customer service reps who seemed at best capable of running me through the "is my computer plugged in" script and searching their canned solutions for an answer. Not really the kind of support you'd expect when your the admin for a complex, integrated enterprise software platform.

I'm not sure when or where their support passed the milestone from "great restaurant" to "Kitchen Nightmare". It's not like there was some well-published devolution. It's not like everyone I've met, when the discussion of Salesforce.com comes up says, "yes, but my god their service and support sucks." Instead, it seems likely that the erosion was taking place behind the scenes, away from the shiny new features that we often get caught up in.

When you use the platform all of the time -- and it mostly just works like it's supposed to -- you don't ask questions, don't raise your voice. A perfect example is help and training -- once upon a time, I used to refer users to the 'Help and Training' section, told them that there were tons of free online training vids to help them understand the application and it's capabilities. Recently, when I went back to look for them, they are all gone -- replaced by training that you must pay for.

The erosion of aspects of the platform like this, it may not affect the core value of the product, but it moves away from one of their old marketing themes. Remember when Salesforce.com was focused on making you, their customer, successful. Somewhere in all of the upgrades to 'The Social Enterprise', they seem to have lost backward compatibility with customer success. They also seem to have chopped out some of the support from my word-of-mouth evangelism platform.

Good Design vs Online Piracy: What So Many Get Wrong

Right versus pragmatic is from a blog by Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper. It's a nice post on how the Hollywood Media industry is failing to adapt their delivery model to their customer base. It's also a great reminder about how often businesses and process owners want to force users into a poorly functioning design simply because it meets some other objectives that probably have little to do with the actual process. Worth a read.

Salesforce.com Customer Service: Transforming Strategic Service Tiers Into Service That Sucks

Recently I ran into a strange issue with Salesforce.com. Perhaps the best way to describe it would be unusual behavior in the application that appeared suddenly with no clear cause. If it were a medical condition, I would put it in the category of, "if this happens, call your doctor."

In the past, I've generally been impressed with Salesforce.com customer service. When I called them, they were often quick to realize that I wasn't simply an end user that had lost forgotten their password. They were friendly, worked quickly to diagnose my issue, and escalate it if necessary -- not that I had a lot of issues with the platform.

So, that probably underscores my surprise and tremendous disappointment in their customer support with this most recent issue.

• Want to submit a case? Gotta go through the web interface. Standard response time, 1-2 days. 
• Email? So outdated. No options. 
• Wanna talk to someone on the phone? Be told repeatedly by the automated system that, unless you have premier support or you have a lot of users unable to access SFDC, you should use the web interface. Then wait for a long time on hold, have someone answer and then they submit a case. Standard response time, 1-2 days. 
• What to use the online Chat feature? Only available at the Premier level service tier. 
• Thinking about contacting your account rep? All that they can do is submit a case. 

In short, their customer support response tier has gone from a benchmark to matching the lowest common denominator of crappy in order to make their premier level seem more valuable. They have essentially deteriorated their base service to service and support in name only. Keep in mind that this is a component of your business infrastructure that you're paying upwards of $1000+ per seat per year for -- what many businesses would consider good customers, business customers.

The funny thing is, considering many of their recent presentations and Dreamforce keynotes, maybe I would get a more responsive experience if I posted my issue on Facebook or Twitter. 

So what's the take-away? Perhaps, as an enterprise software vendor, there is an expectation of an entitlement to annual maintenance fees for service and support. Old habits die hard. At the same time, it's not unusual to see service and support devolve like this -- it's probably more common than 'amazing' customer support. Either way, it's certainly not the level of service that's going to win your business great word of mouth.

When A Thought Exercise Goes Horribly Wrong

Recently, I was hired as the "Empress of Enthusiastic Evangelism". It's the kind of thing that many creative people might get very excited about. It's the kind of thing that I might have gotten excited about. Once. Some time ago.

Sure, everyone wants to work at one of those companies where they get to have cool, funny titles that spit in the eye of traditional business culture -- and now I do. Or thought I did. Until I was hired.

Once upon a time, this company -- my new company -- was the embodiment of that free-minded culture. But then they decided that it made more sense to stabilize and follow a traditional set of values. They decided that it would be a good idea to be predictable, to avoid changing. I came in after that, hired to replace the former Empress who had left, perhaps looking for a more regally appropriate environment.

It goes without saying that I'm not a woman. And 'Enthusiastic Evangelism' really only represents a small portion of what I do. Or am supposed to do -- since lobbying for a new title is one of the things that also takes up a lot of my time. But it's rather difficult convincing the "Lord of Strategic Conquests" that I'm not being taken seriously with my current title.

I've never been one to get hung up on job titles. After all, I do what I do, who cares what they call me. But this one is making it is starting to make me crazy, I mean, forget about the people I have to deal with not taking me seriously, I'm starting to wonder myself. The other day, I started wondering -- what's the next position, where do I go after empress?

Forget About Santa: Target Uses Big Data to Know if You're Naughty or Nice

Here's an interesting couple of items that I came across on Linked In. They are some great insights into the power and pitfalls of big data analytics and it's impact on marketing.

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did by Kashmir Hill with Forbes.

And the original New York Times Magazine article that her post is based upon:
How Companies Learn Your Secrets by Charles Duhigg