Why Today's Shopping Sucks: The rise of on-demand scheduling has made the shopping experience--and workers' lives--miserable.

AuthorSchulte, Brigid

Shoppers hate waiting. If they've made the effort to go shop at a brick-and-mortar store, rather than stay home and order something online, they hate not finding what they're looking for. They hate not finding assistance. They hate bad service.

Unfortunately, bad service is often the norm. Research from MIT's Sloan School of Management finds that large shares of shoppers can't find anyone to help them. They're put off by jumbled piles of unfolded clothes or misplaced items. Many walk out the door without dropping a dime, costing, in one estimate, between 5 percent and 15 percent in lost sales, potentially more if people are frustrated enough to take to social media.

To understand why stores appear dysfunctional, look at how chaotic life is for their workers. Consider the experience of former Target employee Adrian Ugalde. Sometimes, during the holiday rush of Christmas or at back-to-school time, Ugal de received the full-time hours he was promised when he was hired. But outside of that, his hours bounced around, sometimes wildly. One week he was assigned 20 hours of work. The next week, 12. Sometimes he would be on the closing shift until 12:30 a.m., take an hour bus ride or expensive rideshare home to the one-bedroom apartment he shares with four other people, only to be back on the job the following morning at seven. In order to keep his health insurance, the 37-year-old routinely had to beg coworkers to give up their shifts so he could cobble together enough hours of work each week to stay eligible for full-time status.

Ugalde's chaotic schedule is the product of the exploitative use of a sophisticated, "smart software" computer algorithm. For the past several years, these programs have been determining how many retail, food-service, or other hourly service workers are needed per shift; what hours these workers are given each week; and which days and which shifts workers get. The algorithms use big data--previous sales trends, weather patterns, consumer preferences--to predict how many customers are likely to be in a store at a given time, and then assign staffing levels to match that expected demand. More rain predicted? More customers are likely to dash indoors to buy stuff; more last-minute calls are made to weary workers to come in. Or, when the rain doesn't bring in the expected rush, more workers are called in at the last minute and then sent home, often without pay.

Algorithmic scheduling has wreaked utter havoc in the lives, health, financial stability, and future prospects of millions of service workers. Now, 16 million retail workers (one out of every 10 employees in the United States), 12 million food-service workers, and scores of other hourly workers and their families are trapped in a never-ending cycle of precarious and unpredictable low-wage labor. "A computer decides when I work and how much I work and whether I work," said Ugalde, who made $10 an hour at Target. "It's just trying to fit me in like a puzzle piece. A computer doesn't know your life. It only knows what you input."

The rise of scheduling algorithms has been driven by one goal: increasing efficiency to increase profits. In a capitalist economy, that's hardly surprising. Especially in an era dubbed the "retail apocalypse," when brick-and-mortar stores are under increasing pressure from online retail, it sounds brilliant. Use big data to better track customer demand, then come up with a smart-software algorithm to figure out how many workers you need and when to most efficiently deploy them. The cost of labor is the single largest controllable expense for retailers and other labor-intensive businesses. So it's the first place they look to cut.

The push to use new technologies to wring as much value from workers as possible isn't exclusive to this era, or even to brick-and-mortar businesses. New surveillance technology has turned truckers into America's most-watched workers. Amazon--the death star for physical stores--uses algorithms in its warehouses to track and time worker movements.

But it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, it shouldn't be this way. The software is easy to program to treat employees like human beings. Some companies already have programmed software to be humane. And they've found that when they do, it isn't just employee health and well-being that improve. Customer satisfaction does, too. Research shows that better, more predictable schedules for staffers means happier workers. That means better customer service and more sales. And that's better for business.

Nevertheless, U.S. corporations have overwhelmingly chosen to program software to do the opposite. As the data scientist Cathy O'Neil writes in her book, Weapons of Math Destruction, "It's almost as if the...

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