Retail workers under pressure to get your email address

Philly.com (TNS)

For the retail industry, customeremails are currency.

Get that address, and a company can personalize customers’ future experiences, targeting them for discountsand promotions.

The responsibility to capture those emails often falls to the sales associates. In fact, collecting emails and signing customers up for loyalty programs is a big part of those jobs now, said Jill Dvorak, senior director of digital retail for the National Retail Foundation.

But workers at Five Below, the Philadelphia-based national discount chain, say thereare consequences when they don’t. They’re told email collection affects how many hoursthey get each week.

Tiffany Rogers, who worked at the Five Below on Columbus Boulevard, said she was told she had to get emails from 25 percent of customers she rang up.

In February, after watching her hours dwindle from more than 20 a week during the holiday season to 10 to 14 after New Year’s, she was scheduled for just four hours two weeks in a row. When she asked her manager about it, he told her it was because she wasn’t getting enough emails.

Five Below workers across the country who posted on job review sites such as Glassdoor and Indeed had similar accounts. “You have to get at least 20 percent in emails every week and sometimes [it] can be difficult because a lot of customers want to get in and get out or consider Five Below emails spam,” wrote one former employee in Columbus, Ohio, last December.

Five Below marketing manager Dana Zuppo said there is no email quota for cashiers, nor are there incentives for workers to collect emails.

“The email ask at the register,” she said, “is simply to benefit the customer, allowing them to stay in tune with the brand.”

Ms. Dvorak of the National Retail Foundation said she hadn’t heard of retailers using email quotas.