The queue would be shorter if cashiers weren’t forced to read a sales pitch to every one of their customers
Upselling and Add-ons
Serving people on a till is mostly fine. You smile and crack on. There’s occasionally a grumpy customer, but mostly they’re either someone you can have a bit of a laugh with or completely passive and uneventful.
You’d think it would be good enough to be polite and friendly and to get people through the checkout as efficiently as possible. But, no. There’s more.
Unless your customer has signed up for a store card, given their email address for a receipt, been updated about the shop’s new lines, donated to charity, and been upsold a notepad and pen they don’t need, then obviously they've had a terrible time and will never step foot in the establishment again.
|
Would you be interested in one of our bookmarks today? Oh, I see, you're just going to use your receipt. |
You might have been so nice to them that they read your badge and thanked you by name. They might have told your manager you were great on the way out. Doesn’t matter. Unless it can be added to a measurables spreadsheet, it didn't happen.
No one enjoys these interactions. Not you as the cashier, and certainly not the person you’re serving who just wants to get out of there with their stuff as quickly as possible.
Yet, for some reason, this is a primary metric by which retail staff are judged.
The in-person alternative to shopping online these days is to force staff to act as a walking website pop-up that can’t be clicked away.
So, what are these things you’re forced to pitch, and is there actually any point to them?
The Store Card
"Do you have a reward card?"
This is the ultimate retail pact: you give up your personal details, and the company gains your precious shopping data. In return, you get actual vouchers for money off.
The irony is that if you have zero loyalty to any single shop, it works out better for you. Buy cat food from the store down the road for a couple of weeks because it’s on offer and the algorithm from your regular shop with pick up on it and send you some vouchers to win you back. Shop around enough, and there’s a whole behind-the-scenes data battle being fought just for your custom.
| "It's in here somewhere" |  |
If you want one, get one, just don’t stress out the person on the till by worrying that not enough people are buying into the pact.
In the old days of course, data collection wasn’t a thing, and loyalty was based purely on repeat visits. Hence the classic "buy five coffees, get one free" stamp card: simple, anonymous, and transferable. You could give your free coffee to a friend, or do what most people did and forget about the card until it had expired in the bottom of a bag. Today, the frustration of not being able to find the physical stamp card in your purse has simply been replaced by the app logging you out right when you reach the till, while you sweat about holding up the queue.
The Email Receipt
"Would you like your receipt emailed to you?"
On the surface, the emailed receipt is great. You don’t need a physical slip of paper that’s just going to clutter up your pocket or trash the environment. Save a tree, right? But let’s be honest: the real motive isn’t eco-friendliness. It’s secondary data harvesting and keeping the door open for relentless remarketing emails.
The Upsell
"Do you need a packet of batteries with that?"
Actually helpful if you’re buying a toy.
"Do you want a bottle of water with your newspaper and bottle of water?"
Take a wild guess.
"Do you want to buy one of these three overstocked DVDs for an extra fiver?"
No. There’s a very good reason they’re overstocked.
"Would you be interested in our selection of keyrings?"
No thanks, that’s not the kind of thing you buy on a whim. Besides, you’ve already got one that your kid made at school. Wait a second... is that one a capybara in sunglasses carrying a Stanley cup? How much is it?
|
Someone, somewhere overordered. So now you're stuck with Michael McIntyre on your till for the next month. |
There’s always someone, somewhere in the company who absolutely owns the upsell game.
They get featured in the corporate newsletter, lauded on the intranet, or brought in to star in training videos—and you just know everyone in the store secretly hates them. Doesn’t matter what the item is—a packet of sweets, a phone case, or a novelty key ring—they’ll sell more in a single afternoon than entire regional districts do in a week.
Rather than seeing this person as healthy competition or an inspirational role model, the exact reverse happens. They’re an outlier ruining the curve for everyone else. Management looks at them and thinks, "Why can’t the rest of the staff be like this?"
Meanwhile, every cashier on the floor is thinking, "Why is this person trying so hard? Read the room, act like a team player, and calm down."
The Donation
"Would you like to round up for charity today?"
This is easily the least problematic of the bunch. Back when people paid with cash, they’d casually drop their spare change into a plastic collection box by the register. Now that almost everything is a contactless tap, charities would completely miss out if cashiers didn't ask. Giving people the option on the card machine just makes sense.
The Result
At the end of the day, if you’re on the checkout frontline staff you should be used as a script-reading sales bot. Inform and help, absolutely, but the hard sell pushes people away way more often than not and tacking it onto the end of a personal interaction can be to the detriment to great customer servce.
