Employees Also Getting First-Class Treatment

Customers aren’t the only people benefiting from the big emphasis on service.

Nancye Radmin, owner of the Forgotten Woman chain of upscale women’s apparel stores, is convinced that a good salesperson is more important than good merchandise.

“You know how women say the good men are all either married or dead? Well, I feel the same about salespeople,” Radmin told retailers attending the International Council of Shopping Centers spring convention last week in Las Vegas.

To attract and keep the good sales people, Radmin acknowledged that she would do just about anything.

“I go out and steal ‘em,” Radmin said. “And I’ll pay double what someone else is paying to get you.”

The chain offers other rewards as well. In addition to paying commissions on sales, Forgotten Woman offers everyone from the president to the cleaning crew a profit-sharing plan.

Fattening employees’ wallets isn’t the only way firms inspire loyalty among their personnel.

The most successful retailers “build in an extraordinary sense of family and community” among their employees, said Anthony J. Stokan, a founder of Anthony Russell & Associates, a Toronto-based consulting firm.

One Canadian developer picks up half the cost of any self-help course its employees choose to take, Stokan said. “At the end of the year, if the employee has stuck with the program--detox or smoking or whatever--he or she is reimbursed for the full cost of the course,” he said.

Wal-Mart, the Arkansas-based discount store chain, is testing a 90-day program in which some sales staff members wear buttons with a dollar bill that read, “If I don’t smile and greet you, please take my dollar.”

At the end of the test period, any salesperson who still has his or her dollar bill is to send it to company Chairman Sam M. Walton. Walton “will autograph it and return it,” Skelton said.

Smile and the world smiles with you--or at least buys from you.