Nuria Part 3

My partner Nuria has a job at Macy's. She's not a full-time employee, but rather, she works something that Macy's calls "Flex". I assume that is short for "flexible hours". Most weeks, she works about 20 to 25 hours.

Nuria's biggest complaint about Macy's is not the company itself, but the other employees she works with. Nuria says they don't work hard enough. When Nuria sees a customer wandering the store, she goes to the customer and greets them and asks how she can help them. This action often initiates a sale, and Nuria may end up selling that customer hundreds of dollars of product. 

As a result of this action, Nuria is consistently in the number two or three spot with regard to sales, and I am referring to the total dollar amount of daily sales. She is one of the store's top sales people even with her part-time hours. Nuria works. She doesn't dawdle. She gets out and engages with the customers.

Another asset is the fact that Nuria is bi-lingual. Her native language is Spanish, and Macy's has many Hispanic customers. Her Hispanic customers feel much more comfortable speaking with Nuria, because many of them have a poor command of English. 

Nuria sells Macy's products in the truest sense of the word. She doesn't stand around and wait for a customer to bring a product for her to "ring up." No, she's a sales lady. She sells the product. She's friendly with her customers and puts them at ease while she shows them things that they may like to purchase.

Another thing she does is sign up people for a Macy's credit card. The store considers credit cards to be very important. Signing up five or six people for credit cards is a good day.

So a couple days ago, Nuria was at the point of making a big sale -- hundreds of dollars -- plus signing the customer up for a credit card, when another sales clerk came over and told the customer that if she didn't buy that day, she could come back in four days when a sale was scheduled and save money by purchasing the items on sale. So the customer canceled the entire transaction -- both the purchase and the credit card. Nuria was furious but she held her tongue.

Next, I expect the other sales people will be telling Macy's customers to which competitor they should take their business if they want to pay less. But that is not why Macy's is paying them.

The purpose of a sales clerk is to make the sale by helping the customer decide what he/she needs and wants, and to fulfill the transaction. In this instance, Nuria carried out the first part: she helped the customer decide what she wanted. But then the other clerk intervened and the sale was lost. Will the woman return and buy the product she wanted? Maybe. Maybe not. 

There's an old saying: "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Nuria had a sale, it was worth a certain amount of money. With the interference by the other clerk, Nuria traded her sale for a smaller sale that may or may not take place in the future.

Maybe the Macy's sales people need to be reminded that their job is to sell. Some of them seem not to have gotten the memo.