@snoe: I’m also curious as to the proportions of our customers in the categories. It’s really hard to tell, precisely because they are numbers that we’re not counting. And balancing the desires and inconveniences to the various types of customer is difficult.

I understand that, in the days before I joined my company, they had a policy of stand-offishness. Workers were not to engage customers unless customers obviously wanted them to do so.

I can see the point in this. One challenge is, in spotting these customers, not breaking their shopping trance. All too frequently, after I’ve helped a customer, the person immediately checks out (or not) and leaves the store. Have we lost sales because they didn’t stay longer? Does this balance what we did find for them? It would take better tools and telepathy than we have to really know.

@John: One problem that I encounter in your case #1 is that we are always moving things around. People come in believing that they know where things are, but they actually only know where things were. The item isn’t there any more ,and they leave. This is especially a problem when someone comes in for something that had been on a display, but has since moved to another display (which happens a lot) or back into the item’s section. Customers think that we don’t have the item, but we actually do.

In case #3, the spine scan is a useful tool that is very difficult to match without the physical presence of the books. Assuming that the customer knows the appropriate category (which gets into all sorts of taxonomy issues), actually looking at the shelves is usually more effective and consistently more satisfying than doing so with current online technologies.

I can imagine a life-size display on which customers could slide around and zoom in on what they want using a touch-sensitive wall panel, then get it to open and flip through a book, then dump the items out via a print on demand box. (Sounds like something from the Foundation Trilogy.) But even given Moore’s Law, I think we’re at least a decade away from that. And there might be an epidemic of gorilla arm as a result.

1) Of the categories you posit (and any other significant ones), what proportion of our customer base do they represent? [It would be pretty easy to address the needs of any of these hypothetical customers, but would it be worthwhile in terms of the inconvenience posed to other kinds of customers, the booksellers, etc.?]
2) I’m fascinated by a hypothetical customer type: the ones with whom we never (or barely) interact. They don’t ask for help (and politely refuse it when it’s offered), are fully capable of figuring out where the books are that they are looking for, and, if they don’t find them, just leave to pursue some unknown alternative option. [As a corollary: They never complain.] How many of these people do we see? What would they want done differently? Are their enough of them, and are their levels of “maintenance” so low, that catering to them would be the best business model of all?

(The second question, in its probably-naive yearning after an unknown-but-hoped-for ideal, calls to mind the Black Box elevator in Colson Whitehead’s novel The Intuitionist.)

1) I come into the store knowing what I want; I either know where it is, or I ask someone where it is. It isn’t there, so I walk out. (Maybe I order it, but more likely these days I go to an on-line retailer).

3) I go into the store *not* knowing what I want. I look through the books in one or more of the areas that interest me, don’t find anything compelling, and walk out. On-line stores can’t service this demand well, because it would take me hours to look through the hundreds of books that I can take in (at least their spines) in a few minutes.