How to win a customer: tale of one shoe, two loyalty programmes

Open and closed at the same time

I read a post the other day about a shopping trip that went wrong at one of the biggest retailers in the Netherlands. I find it worth sharing and thinking over it because the customer couldn't buy a pair of trainers, then ended up buying two and one of the retailers lost considerably more than the sales itself.

She was standing on the shoe floor holding a 240-euro trainer. The right one. Her size, too. The left one was in the stockroom. As we all know, the stockroom needs a member of staff, and there wasn't one to be seen. So she waited. She turned the display shoe over, as if the left one might be hiding inside it. Then she gave up, looked elsewhere in the city, found nothing, and that evening opened a webshop of another retailer instead. She was offered a good discount for a second pair of shoes and free delivery because she was a loyal customer. 360 EUR later, she is a happy customer with two new pairs of shoes.

Important to note that she holds the top membership tier at the department store and the highest level at the webshop. Two companies had her filed under their very best customers. One of them noticed and treated her like one.

Everybody is buying loyalty. Almost nobody is earning it.

PwC surveyed 5,511 consumers and 406 executives last year. 84% of those executives had increased their spending on loyalty. 46% percent expect their own programme to be irrelevant within three years. 90% believe customer loyalty has grown, while only 40% of customers agree. And 86% of consumers say human interaction still matters to how they experience a brand.

You can see the gap in what the two programmes actually promise. One is a box of presents: vouchers, prize draws, additional 5% discount on your birthday if you spend more than 100EUR. The other removes friction at the moment you buy: delivery included, returns collected from the door, priority on new stock. Presents are lovely. But loyalty is earned throughout the shopping experience.

The real cost never reaches the report

Numerator asked more than 5,000 shoppers about products kept locked away or behind the counter. 27% abandon the purchase or switch retailer altogether, and the ones who refuse to wait push a bigger share of their spending online. Four in ten shoppers say they cannot find a salesperson when they need one, and baskets that involve a proper conversation with a shop assistant are worth meaningfully more.

That walkout was 240 euros of ready-to-buy demand, already in her hand. It appears in no system anywhere. The footfall counter counted her. The checkouts never met her.

It works in the other direction as well. When Sam's Club raised wages and invested properly in its frontline teams, productivity rose 16%, staff turnover fell 25% and sales rose 25% within two years. Staffing is not the cost line. It is the conversion line wearing a disguise.

If your stock is in the back, your concept is a person

If your goods sit in the stockroom, you cannot afford not to have anyone on the shopfloor interacting with the customers. If you neglet that part, you are heading towards losing sales and losing customers. And it is not because of a labour shortage, it is because of your flawed decision-making.

Having a sales person on the floor would have resulted in more than a shoe sale but strengthening the loyalty to the brand, securing repeat visits....and perhaps another thing or two to buy before leaving the store.

Making decisions on staff availability based on reports will not work any more. The reports will show that conversion is going down. It will not say that a customer who was ready to buy walked out of the door because there was nobody to fetch the other shoe.

Sources: PwC 2025 Customer Experience Survey (5,511 consumers, 406 executives, May to June 2025); Numerator survey of 5,000+ consumers on locked and behind-counter merchandise (November 2024); Grail Research for Mindtree, "Impact of Sales Associates on the Shopper's Purchase Journey"; Harvard Business School Institute for Business in Global Society on Sam's Club and the Good Jobs Strategy.