The Daily Stat from Harvard Business Review

 

December 2, 2014 In the Tragedy of the Common Fitting Area, Congestion Begets Congestion A study of fitting-room congestion in a retail clothing chain shows that adding just 1 employee per store to fetch items for customers and clean out the changing rooms increased hourly sales by $400 during peak times, according to a team led by Saravanan Kesavan of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Congestion creates even greater congestion in fitting rooms as customers bring bigger and bigger piles of clothing to try on. That's why the impact of additional labor in the fitting rooms is much larger than that of added labor in any other part of a clothing store, the researchers say. SOURCE: Increasing Sales by Managing Congestion in Self-Service Environments: Evidence from a Field Experiment

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