Keeping your customers safe should be your number one priority as a business owner. Prioritizing safety demonstrates empathy and care for your customers and refocuses the spotlight on them—they are the most important part of your business, after all. These consumers also include the children of your customers. It's prudent to ensure that proper safety procedures are implemented for the well-being of all customers, regardless of their age. But how do you keep customers’ children safe in shopping carts? Read on to find out. This guide explores how taking the proper safety precautions can impact your business and how you can improve your store's safety regulations.
Why Safety Is Important for Your Business
Picture this: your customer is shopping, and their child climbs on the side of one of your refurbished shopping carts and starts rocking it back and forth. After some time, the child rocks it too far and knocks the cart over entirely. It’s likely that this accident won’t just be contained to the cart. This situation will likely affect your inventory and impact other customers, especially if the cart hits them.
Safety is integral to the operation of any grocery chain; most of the safeguards that grocery store owners put in place are in the interest of the customer. You never want your customers’ children to get hurt, which is likely to happen in a situation like the one mentioned above.
Business owners implement various safety protocols and encourage their customers to follow certain rules to safeguard them and protect their investments. It’s important to be client-facing and consider the customer before your own needs. Customers can tell when a business puts them first. If you implement these safety guidelines appropriately, they can benefit your entire business by giving you a reputation for empathy and professionalism.
Consequences of a Lack of Safety
There are many consequences to a lack of safety, the most serious of which is a lawsuit. If a child is running in a store and gets hit by a cart, or if a cart breaks down with them in it and harms them, it could spell disaster for your business. If their children aren't safe in your store, consumers will not shop with you. In addition, if it becomes a pattern that children are being harmed due to faulty equipment or ineffective safeguards in your store, this could quickly become a recipe for disaster.
Now you know some of the consequences of a lack of safety measures, you can start to consider various methods for keeping your consumer's children safe in shopping carts.
Methods of Safeguarding Families in Your Store
There are many methods of safeguarding your customers’ families before the worst can happen. In order for any of these methods to have an impact, you must prioritize safety consistently. If enforcement of the safety measures is inconsistent, the measures you take will be entirely ineffective, increasing the likelihood of accidents and broken shopping carts. Below are a few methods that you can use to keep your customers safe.
Place Restrictions on How They Can Use the Carts
You must place restrictions on how customers are permitted to use the carts. If your employees see a child playing on a cart—which happens often—you should remind the customer of company safety policies. There are many examples of unsafe behavior that we see children exhibit in day-to-day life. Children shouldn't play on the sides of the shopping cart, crawl into the cart, hang off the ends, or run through the aisles with the cart. Do your part to curb these actions in an effort to protect your store, your merchandise, and your customers.
Additionally, there should be policies in place regarding customer behavior. Customers who continuously break these policies should receive some form of corrective action up to and including being escorted out of the premises. This can seem extreme until an accident involving a customer or their children takes place.
Encourage Customers To Carry Their Babies
There are many other things customers can do to mitigate accidents. The onus isn't always on your company to keep their kids safe. One thing parents can do is carry their baby in a baby carrier. This involves strapping their baby to the front or back of their body while they shop. This is a useful two-pronged approach because it keeps your shopping carts safe and keeps the baby safe and secure with their mother. It's important to encourage this option for your customers. You can't control their behavior, but you can encourage behaviors conducive to safety.
How To Prevent Injuries
Injuries are a fact of life. Over the years, it’s likely that an accident will occur in your store. A customer could accidentally run into another customer, or a cart could tip over. Regardless, you need to find a way to prevent injuries from happening to the best of your ability. And if they do happen, you need to be able to decrease the damage caused as much as possible.
Train Your Employees
Training your employees to be vigilant for any accidents or breaches of customer safety policies is integral to the function of your business and should be a top priority. Ensure the carts are cleaned thoroughly and the wheels are well-oiled to keep accidents to a minimum. Instruct your employees to check for problematic situations before they become huge issues. Make sure all employees are up to speed with any new updates in policy and that they enforce company policy when they see something is awry with customer behavior, especially if the concerns relate to the safety of children.
Ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding these policies and behaviors is important. Consumers and employees should all be aware of the policies your store has in place.
Set Expectations for Customers
Customers should know about all policies that are in place. You can subtly alert them to these policies by placing signs throughout the store indicating which activities will not be permitted, such as placing babies in undocked car seats in carts. If you need to manage customer expectations further, you can also instruct employees to correct errant behavior through face-to-face conversations with customers. You must do all these things to promote safety in your company.
These tips will help you succeed as a business owner and an empathetic human being. If you're interested in purchasing safe shopping carts, either refurbished or brand new, shop Carriage Trade Services for great prices and greater value.
