Plan-O-Grams:
Are one of the big factors killing retail today, IMHO.
For those who don't know what these are, they're instructions from a corporate office to a store location, telling the store exactly how corporate wants the store arranged. New plan-o-grams are issued periodically; how often depends on the chain. They basically say, "Move this department's merchandise into this area, move that department over there, move this other one here," etc.
What corporate honchos are trying to do is to rotate merchandise from one location to another, to give it more exposure to customers; this is called re-merchandising.
What's bad about it is this: First, it's the main reason you can't find stuff in the same place twice; just when you learn a store's layout, corporate changes it.
Second, it takes a tremendous amount of staff effort to accomplish. Staff who could be waiting on you have to give you only a fraction of their attention, since the plan-o-gram's instructions have to be followed within a time frame (corporate checks up, trust me). In situations where staff is on commission, re-merchandising efforts take away from their sales time, and cut into their income. In certain chains, this has reached such proportions of abusiveness that staff turnover is incredibly high; the poor people who are trying to make a living can't get any time to sell.
So, now you know why nothing in chain stores is in the same place from visit to visit. You know why the help is surly, and you know why any salesperson who knows what he or she is doing seems to disappear quickly.
Plan-o-grams serve one major purpose - they are used by management people to justify their existence. Management sits in offices and draws new diagrammes, store personnel do the grunt work. Management gets paid handsomely, store personnel get very little. Consideration is not given to how a store is performing - if they're doing great or if customers are completely happy with the store as it is. Management says, "Here's the new plan-o-gram," and that is supposed to be that. The little people are supposed to shaddup and execute.
IMHO, plan-o-grams are one of the many reasons for the lights going out in one store after another, all over this country. They take time away from customers and confuse them too, and aren't customers supposed to be the reason stores exist?
