Denise Yanez, Natalie Leon, Diana Rinza, Maya Araujo, Zoe Klein
As customers navigate the bustling aisles of the grocery store, you finish and make your way to the checkout line. Ahead of you, a young woman, approximately your age is greeting customers with a welcoming smile. She is wearing a Hawaiian shirt that distinguishes her as a Trader Joe’s employee. When you get to her, she immediately greets you and asks about your day. She seems genuinely interested and even shares her favorite products for lunch. The adjacent cashier is an older man who rings up customers with a professional smile and a brief “Have a nice day.” Despite keeping it simple, he demonstrates the positive qualities attributed to a traditional Trader Joe’s employee. The following article will center around the interactions between customers and employees and how they differ based on a cashier’s gender expression. Research suggests a correlation between age and gender regarding these interactions. For this study, we each went to a Trader Joe’s and recorded our interactions with a male cashier and a female cashier. We concluded that while it appears that young female cashiers prefer to engage in conversational interactions, older male cashiers use a more traditional communication style when interacting with customers.
Introduction and Background
Trader Joe’s is a grocery store chain known for its friendly environment, including the cashiers’ tendency to initiate interactions between customers and employees. However, the purpose of our research is to determine whether or not these interactions differ based on a cashier’s gender expression. Prior research on gender-expression’s effect on customer service interactions shows mixed results. In a study comparing politeness between male and female fast-food employees (Gibson, 2009), it was found that cashiers were more polite to a member of the opposite sex than they were to someone of their own sex. This finding differs, however, from the results of another service-industry study (Otterbing, 2021), which highlights how shoppers prefer to interact with employees whose gender is congruent with their own. Due to these inconsistent findings, we hypothesize that there will not be a difference in types of interactions based on gender. There are strict rules and a code of conduct in a service-industry workplace, which may dictate the way an employee is allowed to interact with customers. Since Trader Joe’s employees are known for their positive interactions with their customers, we assume that they are trained to adhere to a non-gendered pattern of speech for the sake of courtesy and politeness. Of course, we are aware that there are several factors that may influence interactions, as demonstrated in a recent study comparing how millennial and Gen-Z employees perceive feedback from their managers and customers (Moore, 2023). Thus, we also hypothesize that there may be other factors that will influence interactions besides gender.
Methods
Our team conducted an observable study to investigate the conversational practices of male and female cashiers at Trader Joe’s. Our research methodology involved interviewing and recording two cashiers, a male and a female, to observe their conversational skills and how they initiated conversations with customers. We utilized our cellular devices to record the interactions of these cashiers with customers and recorded the duration of their conversations. Our team members participated in recording conversations at different locations of Trader Joe’s, including the Westwood branch, and at various times of the day to ensure the highest quality results. Our primary objective was to verify the hypothesis that gender expression influences communication and other factors that might affect the interaction.
We analyzed the conversations that took place at the Trader Joe’s checkout lines and examined the relationship between gender and the tendency to speak more when engaging with customers. We observed several elements of communication, such as the amount of silence, which helped us to understand the willingness of the cashiers to engage in conversations with customers and their overall engagement. However, we did not find any compelling evidence to support our hypothesis that gender plays a significant role in the interactions between cashiers and customers.
We acknowledge that some technical factors, such as the location and time of the recording, might have influenced our results. Nevertheless, the findings from our study provide valuable insights into the conversational practices of cashiers at Trader Joe’s and the role that gender plays in communication with customers.
Results and Analysis
Food service industries must often balance between serving as much customers as possible, while maintaining customer satisfaction. This is usually influenced by the store’s business and the amount of products a customer purchases. Therefore, as part of our analysis, we incorporated a quantitative and qualitative component, wherein duration of each interaction could not be used as a determinant. What we did measure, however, was the amount of seconds of silence and words each interaction produced. Raise your hand if you have ever heard the concept “chatty Kathy”.
Why is it never a “vocal Victor? Perhas because the tendency to talk too much is usually a stereotype is that associated with women. Our research demonstrates that this could be a myth, results showed that both sexes had similar amounts of silence. Male cashiers totaled 124 seconds of silence and female cashiers were at 121. Hardly a difference at all! Sure, ringing groceries requires concentration and silence is probably not the best measure, so we decided to tally the amount of words expressed by the cashiers. Once again, the difference between both sexes was not very significant. Women used 341 words, while men expressed a total of 317. But what about the content of the conversation? We found that cashiers on both sides of the gender spectrum were just as likely to stick to the predictable greetings, offerings of bags, and announcement of grand totals as they were to ask about your day, comment on the nice necklace that one of our researchers was wearing, or offer a lollipop for the sake of sweetening your day. Therefore, our research did not garner any compelling results to indicate that gender played a role in the interactions with the researchers. At least not a significant one.
Discussion and Conclusions
The conclusion of any project provides an opportunity for the researcher to reflect on their methodology and identify areas for improvement. After conducting our investigation, our group determined that our study may have been flawed by various unknown factors. Variables such as the gender expression of the customer potentially leading to gender bias from the employee and the positionality of the researcher—how our observations affect our analysis relative to our own presentations, perspectives, and beliefs—both affected how we analyzed our findings. Because the sample size was small, our data cannot accurately represent each and every Trader Joe’s employee at a given location, only the stores this study conducted research at. With these limitations in mind, the next step to furthering this study should encompass a methodology that better addresses such issues or any other potential limiting factors.
References
Gibson, E.K (2009). Would you like manners with that? A study of gender, polite questions and the fast-food industry. Griffith Working Papers in Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication 2, 1: 1-17.
Karrebæk, M. S., Riley, K. C., & Cavanaugh, J.R. (2018). Food and language: Production, Consumption, and circulation of meaning and value. Annual Review of Anthropology, 47, 17-32.
Moore, K. (2023). The Millenial/Zer Need for Feedback: Four Reasons Why and How to Give It. In Generation Why: How Boomers Can Lead and Learn from Millennials and Gen Z (pp. 111-128). McGill-Queen’s University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.3078925.13
Otterbing, T., Bhatnagar, R., Samuelsson, P., & Borau, S. (2021). Positive Gender Congruency Effects on Shopper Responses: Field Evidence from a Gender Egalitarian Culture. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 63, 102738. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2021.102738
Wang, S., Beatty, S. E., & Liu, J. (2012). Employees’ Decision Making in the Face of Customers’ Fuzzy Return Requests. Journal of Marketing, 76(6), 69-86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41714520