Her Job Requires 7 Apps. She Works Retail.
Responding to the customer’s demand for instant gratification in the middle of the retail apocalypse.
It’s Dec. 17 and a customer at the Old Navy on 18th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan has a problem: She’s looking to get matching Jingle Jammies for her family but can’t find a size 3T for her son.
Daisy Tecotl has a solution. She checks the In Stock On Shelf app on her store-issued mobile device to see if there’s a 3T in the stockroom. There isn’t, so she opens the Order In Store app and arranges to ship it to the woman before Christmas.
The sale is reflected in yet another app, the Sell app, that pings Ms. Tecotl, a 24-year-old merchandising manager, with hourly figures on sales and credit card sign-ups and several other metrics, which she uses to broadcast guidance to “refocus” her sales associates, who, like her, are outfitted with earpieces and walkie-talkies.
“Maybe our focus is getting more customers that come in to purchase more,” Ms. Tecotl said by way of example, “so maybe the refocus is handing out mesh bags” — the store’s branded shopping bags — “and saying hello a little bit more.”
As brick-and-mortar stores scramble to justify their continued existence, they’re trying to be all things to all customers, to blend instant gratification and infinite selection. And it falls upon the workers on the front lines to make it all happen.
Entry-level associates at Old Navy have store-issued mobile devices, too, that do things like ping them when a customer buys the last item in a particular size so they can replenish it from a stockroom that holds over 250,000 items (don’t worry, the app tells them where to find it), or ring up customers anywhere in the store’s 30,000-square-foot, three-story expanse, or notify them of a BOPIS — that’s Buy Online Pickup In Store, which sends an associate to find the items on the sales floor — “sort of a reverse replenishment,” Ms. Tecotl explained — and scan them in and print the invoice and stick it on a bag with the customer’s information and bring it up to the BOPIS register, where it goes on a numbered shelf.
Old Navy at Christmastime is like Old Navy only more so — more people, more shirts and sweaters and Rockstar jeans stacked high or lying in picked-over piles sprawling off the shelves and hangers, more exclamation points. “Jingle! Jolt! Jam!” reads a sign above the women’s pajamas. “Zip. Zap. Gifts!!” “S¡ze Yes!” “Giftastic!”
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