A new Slop University marketing campaign builds a self-graded Checkout Candour Index from interviews with checkout staff about the pause after the bag-fee prompt, and reports the University placing first on it, four quarters running.
Built from checkout staff's own accounts of the pause after the bag-fee prompt, the Checkout Candour Index has placed the University first, four quarters running
There is a beat, after a checkout worker says that will be fifteen cents for the bag, before the customer answers. The School of Continuous Improvement has spent a season asking checkout staff what actually happens in it.
Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School, interviewed till and counter staff across supermarkets and strip-mall shops, collecting the pause in their own words rather than a customer-facing script’s. The accounts fed a new instrument, the Checkout Candour Index, which scores a store not on whether the fee is charged but on how plainly staff say what happens if a customer says nothing at all. The School has now run the Index over its own signage output and returned a placement it is happy to publish: first, four quarters running.
The result carries the University’s newest campaign, Ranked, Not Rated, onto the bus-stop and campus screens this month. No outside body drew the comparison; the Index is the School’s, the ranking is the School’s, and the University has adopted both without waiting for anyone else to check the arithmetic.
You learn more from the pause than from the answer. We built the Index to keep listening to it.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The campaign carries no claim about what any particular shop should do with its bag fee. It carries only the Index’s own placement, and the School’s account of what earned it.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.wtniyh.