2013 year-end shopping experience won't be as Merry

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

Understaffed retailers steeling themselves for year-end peak shopping season

Retailers are bracing themselves for crunch time - the year-end peak shopping season - because they are having trouble manning their stores adequately and they know that service levels are not where they once were.

Welcome to shopping paradise Singapore, where customers say they have trouble getting service and shop owners say, "Sorry, we do not have enough staff."

Retailers told The Sunday Times that they are bracing themselves for crunch time - the year-end peak shopping season - because they are having trouble manning their stores adequately and they know that service levels are not where they once were.

They point to tighter foreign labour rules and the continued difficulty of hiring Singaporeans for sales jobs.

The foreign worker quota fell from 50 per cent to 45 per cent in July last year to the current 40 per cent after the Manpower Ministry's latest revision this July.

BACKGROUND STORY
Human touch needed

"What we hear from the fashion retailers is, when clothes come, they come in a huge bundle. These huge bundles have to be sorted. You need a salesperson to pick up each and every single outfit and sort them according to size, put them on a hanger, steam iron them. These are things you can't use robots to do.

If you want to exchange something, a person has to go into the back room and look for the size and put (the item) back on the shelf. It's very labour-intensive. At every touchpoint, you still need a human to do all these things."

MR STEVEN GOH, executive director of the Orchard Road


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