Generally you have little to no service interaction in these stores. The people in them are order takers, not sellers; whenever they are pushed to sell, the customer finds it intrusive since normally its value-less or negative products (cough, extended warranties).
There also never is enough staff. The staff doesn't have time to provide customer service in meaningful ways; they more or less clean, stock, cashier, and do everything instead of be dedicated sales people. They literally cannot do so unless its very high value sales where the service is the key to making a big, infrequent sale over many small ones.
BeetleB, Most of that old-style retail is dying out though. The department store model of Sears and Macys lost to the big-box model of walmart and best buy. These days you are lucky if there is enough staff to run the registers in a pinch; big box retail and specialty can be absurdly cheap.
Like the whole gamestop debacle-go into the store and you'll find maybe they have barely enough payroll to have more than one person in the store on non-peak days.
Getting to the discussion at hand: Are they dying because of a lack of tips? It seems their decline is orthogonal to the issue.
Also, as someone pointed out, they typically get paid commissions, but my there are lots of other places where one does get pretty good service without tips or commissions:
> Generally you have little to no service interaction in these stores.
Actually, in stores like Nordstrom, you get a lot more service (if you want it) than at a restaurant - even when you don't want it. I avoided them for years for this reason. They have a fair number of people who spend much much more time providing these services than doing the other stuff you mentioned.
Fair enough. A key difference, of course, is that the commission is well defined compared to the tip, which is left to the whims of the customer.
Getting back to my original question: I often get better service from grocery store workers (depending on the chain, of course), than I do from restaurant workers. Yet no one pays them a tip. Same goes for Costco employees. Often the worker at the REI store will spend an inordinate amount of time helping me. No one pays them a tip, and they don't get a commission. From my perspective, all of these people are actually providing a service to me that I actually want, when I want it. Whereas with waiters, they are typically forced upon me. It's usually the exception that I want some service that requires a waiter.
The point being: There are more ways than tips to build a culture of good service, and it's inane to think tips are needed to maintain quality.
There also never is enough staff. The staff doesn't have time to provide customer service in meaningful ways; they more or less clean, stock, cashier, and do everything instead of be dedicated sales people. They literally cannot do so unless its very high value sales where the service is the key to making a big, infrequent sale over many small ones.