Policies going waste
I went to a retail mall today and bought some products. I reached the bill counter and noticed they had hung some cloth bags (with the mall’s brand name) for customers to purchase. I must say, the bags very really cheap. The most probable explanation to this was so that at least a few customers would buy these instead of the free plastic bags. It could serve multiple purposes; it may have been environmental concern, it may have been branding or it may have been a strategy to reduce some costs by saving on plastic bags.
I bought one. The next instant, the billing guy packs all the items, including the cloth bag into a plastic bag! I talked to him and found out that he had no clue why the cloth bag was being sold! Subsequently, after my lecture, this billing guy started asking the next customer whether she wanted a plastic bag or a cloth bag.
Lesson learnt: It is not enough if an organization takes a decision at the highest level. When it trickles down to implementation, the employees at the lowest level must be educated. The best intentions at the top may lead to nothing in real result.
September 28th, 2009 at 10:58 PM
… but soon enough he will stop asking customers, because 1/1000 will want to buy- rather get plastic bags for free.
October 1st, 2009 at 5:43 PM
Nice job Ashwin…I really appreciate..but the thing here is first of all customer wont carry the bags everytime when they go shopping, and next point they are not ready to spend(eventhough they have spent much more money on waste things while shopping) on cloth bags when plastics bags are freely provided by the shopkeeper….