2020/11/30/Lowe's pick-up lockerfsck
Recent experiences at Lowe's (specifically, #2778 on Fayetteville Road) have me thinking corporate HQ needs some real help in the IT department.
Sequence of Events
|
How It Started
Last Tuesday, I placed an online order for in-store pickup:
- 1 bottle Gorilla Glue
- 2 cheap paintbrushes
- 1 DPDT switch
An email said the order was ready later that night, so I went in to pick it up on Wednesday.
How It's Supposed to Work
You get an email when your order is ready to pick up. If the items are small, they put them in a locker instead of making you go inside to the service desk, in which case the email has a bar code and a pickup number. When you get to the store, there's a bank of computer-controlled lockers in the foyer, on the left, just outside the customer service entrance -- you can either scan the barcode (from your phone or a printout) or manually key in the number, and it'll open the locker which supposedly contains your order.
Then you take your order, close the locker door, and walk out of the store. Total time easily less than a minute.
How It Actually Went
Wednesday: I scanned the barcode on my phone, and a locker popped open -- but the stuff inside wasn't my stuff, and the printout had someone else's name on it.
I tried keying the code in manually, in case the barcode had somehow mis-scanned -- but the same locker opened again.
So I went in to customer service and stood there for about 15 minutes waiting for someone to talk to me. There was someone already in the spot marked "stand here for pickup", so I had to kind of stand awkwardly off to the side. Fortunately, it wasn't crowded.
Eventually, someone talked to me. I told them what I'd found; they went out and retrieved the wrong-order from the locker, and went looking for mine -- which, after another 10 minutes or so, they admitted not being able to find, and went back to pull the items manually.
After another 10 minutes or so, they came back with the glue and paintbrushes but said the switch was on special order and I would "probably" receive an email when it came in. That's fine; the switch was less urgent. I took what they had and left.
After I started driving away, I realized they only gave me one of the 2 brushes I ordered. I decided to let it go for the time being; maybe I could ask about that when the switch came in.
Saturday: In the meantime, I needed another item, so I went ahead and ordered that. Since it was just one item, I figured there was a good chance they'd get the order right -- which they did. Yay.
Monday: This morning someone from Lowe's called my cellphone.
I have phone-phobia and normally have a hard time with phones, but a combination of things made this call seem handle-able -- so I picked up. They wanted to confirm that I had picked up the first order. I told them about what happened, and the fact that I only got one of the brushes, and they asked if I wanted to pick the brush up right away or wait until the switch came in. I said it could wait. We hung up.
About an hour later, an email came in saying my order is ready for pickup. Unfortunately it's not a locker pickup, as far as I can tell; have to go into the service desk for some reason.
So I did that -- and once again, they didn't have the order ready; the front desk person eventually had to go back to retrieve it, after initially trying to find it at the desk.
She brings up a box about 12"x15"x4". I confirm that this is just for the switch; she says yes and laughs nervously. I ask about the brush, and she says she can look into it. I said only if it won't take too long, and she seemed happier just to let it drop -- so we didn't pursue that.
So I have my switch now, and one of the two brushes. I'll eventually order another one, if their system doesn't eventually realize that I need to pick that up too and create a pickup for it.
But their order management is obviously a huge mess.
Analysis
I can't see this being anything the workers are doing wrong; they seem competent, and I believe they're doing the best they can. If they're making mistakes, it's because the system makes that easy to do.
Based on my experiences in manufacturing and retail, it seems to me that there are several points at which IT processes would have prevented both of these snafus:
- 1. For picking an order, the pick-ticket printout should list the items to pick up. Each item should have a barcode (and, to save time, the item's location).
- 2. When picking an item for an order, the procedure should be:
- (a) Scan the item on the pick-ticket
- (b) Scan the actual item's barcode
- (b1) if the item can't be scanned for some reason, manual entry should be possible -- but this should trigger some kind of flag for later review. Why didn't the item have a bar code?
- (c) If the item is to be picked in quantity >1, ask the user to enter the number picked. (They can enter a number lower than the amount requested, so the system will know that not all the ordered quantity of that item have been picked.)
- 3. When putting a picked order into a locker, the procedure should be:
- (a) scan barcode on the pick-slip
- (b) scan the locker you're going to put it in
- The system will record that pickup X went into locker Y, and open the locker. If there's some reason it shouldn't go into that locker (e.g. already occupied, or the wrong size), the locker will refuse to open and the scanner will show an error message.
- 4. Generally, whenever someone does anything on an order -- e.g. noting that only one of a qty two item was picked up -- that should be reflected on all subsequent order actions or accesses. (Why didn't the customer service rep know the paintbrush was needed, even after I spoke with another rep about it? Why didn't today's pick-up include that item, which was almost certainly in stock?)
I'm available for consultation if Lowe's would like a roadmap for how to fix these problems.