Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

Home Depot (HD) has had a lot of buzz lately about its customer service plan of paying cash for customer service excellence by putting aside $30 million for that purpose.

I've worked with big-box stores before and I agree with some of the analysts that say this isn't going to solve the problem.

George Whalin, Retail Management Consultants says, "[The plan] doesn't solve the basic, core problem of having knowledgeable people working in your stores. ... You can't just throw money out there if you don't have enough people on the floor to help the customer."

Harry Friedman, founder of Friedman Group retail consultants added "This is not going to solve a thing. Subjective approaches don't work over a period of time.

"The problem is that the operations are set up such that [the sales associates] get in more trouble for not remerchandising the shelves than they would for not going that extra mile with the customer."

I have to agree with their particular insights from my own experience. I've seen great, knowledgable workers in big-box stores get burned out over relatively short periods of time because of the business model that has been implemented.

Essentially the model, as far as workers go, is to have a core group of full-time workers that are your top people, and supplement them with a whole bunch of part-timers.

Numerous times I've watched as departments with one person has 3 or 4 customers waiting as the worker engages one at a time. Almost always the people walk out and leave a lot of money on the table. I remember trying to show this to management and they simply give me a look as if I should know better in the situation.

How many times in these big-box stores do people walk that would easily pay for a person or two more in the department? Many times as the average sale at these stores is quite high, and in some departments it is huge.

They wouldn't listen then and they are still going to have the problem as long as they continue with this type of business model, no matter how much money is offered to the employees.