Working for Target off and on over the past 10 years has been an eye-opening experience indeed. It was my first job working retail and I honestly had no idea what to expect when it began. I just wanted to get out of the grocery store deli I had been working in, and it all worked out. When I first started, the store hadn’t even opened yet, which was quite a crazy experience, trying to get ready, trucks coming every day, seeing the store come alive bit by bit, week by week, because of the efforts we, the initial crew, made.
The terminology at Target is quite a bit different too. It makes me think of Facebook (which wasn’t even around when I began working for the Bullseye) and its series of “like”s and “friend”s. It showed me early how important the words we use are, and how they can shape an entire experience. A group of individuals at Target Corporate must have been working hard the day they came up with several terms that have stuck and infuse the culture by which Target employees work.
1) We have guests, not customers. Being a customer means you’re trespassing on our territory. It’s our store, and you’re just spending your money here, that’s how some other stores work, and the word “customer” has been used ad nauseum to describe that service / servicer relationship. At Target, though, what I learned was that the people who come to the store are referred to as guests, because guests are always welcome and a guest isn’t necessarily someone who is paying for something. They’re just hanging out at your crib, enjoying themselves.
2) We are team members, not staff. The word “staff” connotes that there are levels of team members, that we aren’t one cohesive whole, but if everyone is a team member, everyone is striving to make the store better, together. It’s amazing what terminology can do for people who visit the store, and also for those of us who live there.
3) Everything we do is about the “guest experience,” a term that is so all-inclusive it was actually scary to me when I first heard about it. When I say everything, I mean everything. From the way we greet guests in the parking lot, to the interactions in the store with team members, to the checkout experience at the front lanes, to the signage around the store (which right now is sporting large “Ho Ho Ho” signs), the guest experience is a special undertaking.
4) At Target, it’s also all about the “brand,” something the team members make fun of at times, but something we also take very seriously too when we’re on or off the floor. Keeping it brand means doing everything safely, effectively, ethically, and for the glory of the guest experience, as well as the team member experience. Brand stretches from the way we dress (rocking the red and khaki), to the way we climb ladders (three points of contact), to the break room where everything has its place. So keeping it brand is as much a culture as the guest experience.
Target isn’t perfect, don’t get me wrong. Anytime a business has many different team members from many different backgrounds with many different points of view, issues can come up, but what I love about Target is that those issues are few and far between. They’re few and far between because the team honestly cares about the guest experience and about keeping it brand, and that’s good enough for me.
Sam
Sam's Online Journal 