Shane Nickerson wrote over a year ago about his experience with Sony warranty service. Well, it hasn’t gotten any better as I have been struggling (patiently) with Sony’s outsourced repair service (Precision Camera Repair) for the last 8 weeks. They are doing the repair free of charge, but they just aren’t doing a good job of it. It is going back for repair for the third time in a row.
Is it any wonder that albertsons will be – i am assuming that they can’t fight the market reality – selling itself off?
According to the article here, they have a lot of competition, and suffered from a 20 week strike last year.
But more importantly, I think, since then they haven’t improved what matters to customers, so they won’t gain or even retain any customers. I found myself shopping at albertson’s yesterday because of its familiar location, and then reminded myself, “Why did I come here again? I usually choose go to Safeway”
The local albertson’s has a total of two checkers at peak hours and usually only one most of the other times of day. The store itself still has 8 or 9 fully equipped checkstands. It also has 4 self-service check-out terminals where there’s a line due to the software locking up waiting for a checker to come over and reset it, and due to shoppers just being entertained by the animated graphics.
I’m sure they could sell a lot more food if they could get customers out of the store faster.
I think what happened after the strike is that they put in automated terminals to protect against future labor disputes, while also laying off workers to control costs. Unfortunately, that was the beginning of a downward spiral, since with less workers to help customers, the customers get fed up and go elsewhere, causing revenues to drop again.