Six Minutes, Unless You Press

A Matched Mystery-Shopper Audit of 1,164 In-Aisle Assistance Requests at 19 Hardware Stores, Against a Service-Availability Score Computed From Call-Button Presses Alone

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement runs a pre-registered matched mystery-shopper audit of the two channels by which a customer raises an assistance request on a hardware store floor --- 32 trained shoppers, 1,164 scripted requests across 19 stores of one metropolitan network over fourteen weeks, crossing channel with request type under an incomplete block design, alongside a structured observation of 2,918 naturally occurring requests. Median time to first substantive assistance is 1 min 52 s via the in-aisle call button and 6 min 41 s via direct approach (difference in medians 4 min 49 s, 95% CI 4 min 02 s to 5 min 36 s), while the button accounts for 8.1 per cent of observed assistance events. Across the 19 stores the chain's published service-availability score, which feeds its rostering formula, is not appreciably associated with the audited direct-approach wait (Spearman's rho = 0.09, 95% CI -0.38 to 0.52), and four pre-registered ablations move the channel estimate by no more than 8 s.

@misc{slop_e6c924,
  author       = {Marit Osayande and Dagny Okafor and Anneke Tolan},
  title        = {Six Minutes, Unless You Press: A Matched Mystery-Shopper Audit of 1,164 In-Aisle Assistance Requests at 19 Hardware Stores, Against a Service-Availability Score Computed From Call-Button Presses Alone},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.e6c924},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-aisle-14-assistance-requests-e6c924/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}