Today I went into Staples to buy a ream of paper. I immediately noticed that the store layout was identical to that of every other Staples I’d been in: the red panels and white lettering, the red carpeting and white shelves, the sans-serif type that was so contemporary fifty years ago. I thought, this must be from the eighties, before there were office superstores. And I was right.
While waiting in the checkout line to buy my ream of paper, I fact-checked Staples on my phone. Sure enough, like Office Depot, Staples was founded in 1985 by a couple of guys who managed supermarkets. I also discovered that Staples and Office Depot attempted a merger in 1991 and were stymied by the Federal Trade Commission. But that’s another story.
This story is about standing in the checkout line of a Staples in 2025. The place was old and sad. The music was old and sad. The people were old and sad. Don’t get me wrong. They were nice people, courteous people, real people who were doing their level best until death. But they gave you the sense that they were totally defeated and Staples in 2025 was the only option left.
There were a few customers in line, one of whom was at the checkout counter. She was late middle-aged, dressed in what might have been considered professional in the nineteen-eighties and purchasing a twenty-pound box of printer paper that was on sale. The cashier, also her age, used a small dolly to put the box on the floor next to her cart. The lady bent over to pick up the box and put it into the cart, and everyone gasped. The guy behind me offered to help, but she said, “It’s okay. I do this all the time.”
After picking up the box in the most painful and injurious way imaginable and hefting it into her cart, there was a moment of silence. We waited for her to call the ambulance. But she didn’t. So we went back to ignoring her. At least the others did. I watched her out the window schlepping the box out of the cart and into her trunk like it was nothing. I thought, it’s true, she does do this all the time.
After she left, the place felt empty. Like the set of a sitcom when the filming is done. There might have been someone bunching-up extension cords and pulling up duct tape, but otherwise, nothing. It was the feeling you get when you’re in an old cathedral, something that was once a big fucking deal and no longer is. A place devoid of purpose.
The cashier told me that I was next. So I stepped up and put my ream of printer paper on the counter. She asked me about my day. I said that it was an okay day. And that’s when I got the distinct feeling that this question was supposed to be part of an experience, my experience of Staples. Like the cathedral, the whole place was designed to make me feel something that I did not feel. The question about my day, in conjunction with the cashier’s uniform, the music, the Staples-themed decor and the splendid ream of paper I was purchasing were supposed to amount to something called customer satisfaction.
I reckoned that the idea of customer satisfaction must have been invented before the card-reader and screen-keyboard combo at which the cashier was working. Because the idea of customer satisfaction had nothing to do with the junk that surrounded it. Though the junk was new, it looked like junk. These days, everything new is superannuated and looks like junk. This junk was piled up around a half-century-old idea of customer satisfaction.
After buying my ream of paper, I went to the Safeway in the same strip mall. There, too, was the expectation of a shopping experience ending with customer satisfaction. Because the place was busier than the Staples, I assumed that the experience would be a bit more exciting than it had been at the Staples. Adding to the possible excitement was my intention to buy a bottle of medium-bodied red table wine, which in itself was more exciting than a ream of paper. However, I didn’t have an experience that anyone would call satisfactory.
Here’s what happened. Under the bottles of wine were tags that showed the price of the bottle in a small font and the “Safeway for U™” price in a larger font. Because I wasn’t a Safeway for U™ member and I didn’t want to be one, I found this a bit off-putting. I didn’t see why I should have to give away my consumer data in exchange for a lower price on a bottle of medium-bodied red table wine. Maybe the marketing team had assumed that being a Safeway for U™ member would enhance my shopping experience.
In any case, I couldn’t help but regard this as a mistake. The marketing team had failed to consider that the effect of excluding people from lower prices would not make them want to become a Safeway for U™ member, but, rather, would make them want to shop elsewhere. They had not considered that just a mile down the road was the Grocery Outlet, where you could buy the same wine, more wine and better wine for a third less than a Safeway for U™ member could.
It goes without saying that I left that Safeway without buying anything. And I’d have to rate my so-called shopping experience as a nil out of five, meaning, unsatisfactory to nonexistent. Or does a satisfactory shopping experience exist at all? Most people these days shop online, where it’s just a matter of buying something at the lowest price possible. It’s a return to the basics: here’s the goods, here’s the price, here’s the shipping cost, click, click, click, complete purchase. Something you do without having to feel anything. The same way people sold things in the open-air markets five thousand years ago. No need for a marketing team to subject the customer to a so-called “experience” or a soundtrack that wouldn’t offend anyone with a pulse. You offer the goods at a lower price than anyone else can. End of story.
So when, I ask, will brick and mortar get the message? When will they focus on getting the customer out the door before the magic wears off? When will they let employees wear what they want to wear and hear what they want to hear? Music should not be for the customers but for the people who deal with the customers. When will these brick-and-morter anachronisms offer customers the best prices in town and stop trying to extract their data? When will they figure that the only so-called experience that today’s shopper wants is the oldest one there is?