You people aren't even BUYING anything!

[rerant]

After my smoke during my break today I thought I would wait out the last few minutes of said break in the cash office shooting the shit with the coordinators, one of whom was intently staring at the computer screen at the desk.

"Did you know that last Saturday 51% of the people in the store were just visitors?"

So of all the people we had in, only 49% bought anything. This includes restaurant sales.

So what the hell are these people coming here for!?
Go home, dammit!

An issue was addressed while looking at these numbers.
On weekends our store is PACKED (though apparently with only less than half being actual paying customers). I mean packed to the point where if you had a cart you'd barely be able to maneuver it around through the store.

Now, like any establishment, we have a maximum capacity set by the fire marshall.
There is no doubt in any of our minds that on busy weekends we're going over capacity due to customer volume. This is not counting the number of coworkers in the building, which is usually around 250 on the weekends.

Now my store is HUGE (biggest in the province and, I think, the country) so our capacity must be in the thousands.

If we ever had an evacuation during these busy days people would literally get trampled and, possibly, seriously hurt.

But what can we do? Take a head count and lock the doors when we get too full?
Maybe we should have LP stand at the doors like bouncers at a club.
"Two can go in once two come out."
Should we have VIP list, too?

Now I know I'm making light of a very serious situation, but between the three of us involved in this conversation not a one of us could think of a reasonable solution to this problem.
One of the coordinators suggested calling the fire marshall on one of his days off to tip them off that we're likely above capacity then letting them decide how we should deal with it.

I've been thinking about this since the talk and I still can't think of a reasonable way of dealing with the capacity issue.
Our managers are suckers for the almighty dollar and loathe the notion of closing the doors to a possible sale.
Why, depending on who the DM is for the night they'll keep us until almost 10:45 to serve ONE person buying ONE thing.

So, CS, can any of you think of a way to fix this capacity issue?
Keeping in mind only barely half of those people are actually spending any money.

[rvdammit]

Security on entrance/exit with radios. Person on entrance as a two way clicker so they can count up and down.Counts people in, and when exit person says people out clicks them away.

Have nice security person on entrance explain about max capacity when blocking people from entering, and have nice sign made up so it can be ignored.

[crazylegs]

Landmines, lots of landmines.

Make sure however they are stategically placed under signs that say 'landmines' so only truely sucky customers are whacked.

[Becks]

Crazy, I like that idea!!!

[AdminAssistant]

This happened back home...The local mall was gearing up for the ever dreaded Black Friday. This mall had an electronics store with an outside entrance; it was going to open up at, lets say, 5 am. On the news they announced that they would only take a certain number of people at a time (I think it was 100-200, something like that). That made sense to me, it's a smallish store and there's lots of expensive breakable items laying about. My sister actually braved the crowds to go shopping on Black Friday, and she said that there were a LOT of people complaining.

"But WHYYYYY can't all 600 of us cram into this tiny store? WHYYYY?"

[rerant]

Security on entrance/exit with radios. Person on entrance as a two way clicker so they can count up and down.Counts people in, and when exit person says people out clicks them away.

Have nice security person on entrance explain about max capacity when blocking people from entering, and have nice sign made up so it can be ignored.

That was the first thing we thought of, but the only way to do that would be to lock all the doors and unlock them for people leaving.
We have three entrances, all of which are very large.

If we were, say, the size of a Wal Mart that might work, but to put into perspective how big we are imagine a Costco x2 with two floors.
And that's x2 on each floor.

It's likely there's very little we can do, but the thought of something like an evacuation ever happening (again) frightens me. It would be utter chaos.

[rvdammit]

The only other way that comes to mind is networked turnstiles counting people in and out (with a manual click on wide gates) with a small display showing the people count at each entrance.