James Leong | Web Developer

It wasn’t that long ago when our trolleys in the supermarkets were in disarray.  Shoppers after checking out their items in a supermarket generally do not bother to move the trolleys back to their original holding location. 

That is… till the innovation of the chain contraption whereby a person needs to slot in a dollar coin before the trolley could be removed from the trolley chain.  To retrieve back the dollar coin, the shopper will need to chain back the trolley.  The dollar coin was used as some sort of a deposit to incentivize shoppers to return the trolley back to its original holding location.

Some might feel that a civil conscious Singaporean would have returned the trolley to its rightful position without the need of such contraption.  But, maybe instead of overly relying on the innate good naturedness of human beings, it is time for us to start thinking about creating systems with the incentives aligned towards our objectives.

Apparently, since the system is working:

Benefits of a shopper using the trolley > Inconvenience of the shopper in returning it to the trolley queue

Morale of the Story:  By aligning the incentives of the system to the desired outcome/objectives, we can more easily achieve our goals.

But seriously, why not just hire another staff (let’s call him the trolley man) to help return trolleys back to the queue.  It might increase costs slightly.. but the increase in costs might be insignificant if we divide the wages of the trolley man by the number of purchases (as in the case of our endless queues at the checkout counters in NTUC).  Hmmm… besides.. it helps with unemployment… 

Seriously, a trolley man might be the best alternative.  Some people will see the chain contraption as a cost savings to the organisation.  But simply looking at the problem that way would have ignored the fact that the trolley man provides a service far superior to a mechanical chain, i.e.  what if the shopper did not have a dollar coin to spare?  what if the shopper needs to rush off somewhere else and that 2 minutes of fumbling for coins and returning the trolley to its rightful location is just… too costly?

Basically, if

Inconvenience of the shopping using and returning the trolley > Wages of Trolley man / no of trolleys returned per month

Then an optimal system will be to hire a dedicated trolley man to take charge of the returning the trolleys….

Morale of the Story:  Success of a system should always be based on the actual benefit and cost analysis across many different stakeholders.

Hmmm… which makes me wonder… as companies replace phone receptionist with automated answering machines that tells you to….

Press 1 if you would like to speak to sales…. Press 2 if you……

Are they really running their Customer Management System in an optimal way?  If you ask me, I think I would prefer to pay a couple of dollars more for some better service over the phone…