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Broken: Bloomingdale's accessibility
Here's a small one-scene customer experience play for today:
Setting: Bloomingdale's, the famous Manhattan retailer.
Players: Man with baby in stroller; nearby retail clerk.
Man notices hastily printed sign on elevator: "Temporarily out of service."
Man to clerk: "Excuse me, is there another elevator we could use?"
Clerk: "No. There's an escalator over there."
Man exits store right.
Why is this customer experience broken? Let me count the the ways.
• Bloomingdale's, a major retailer spread across many floors, has only one elevator accessible from its Lexington Avenue entrance.
• The clerk, upon seeing a customer in need, suggests an irrelevant solution and then goes back to work.
• There is no acknowledgment that this is an inconvenience - not the clerk, not even the sign. Customers who can't climb stairs or stand on an escalator - customers in wheelchairs, parents with strollers - are just out of luck.
• The company loses revenue from this transaction and future transactions when the customer will likely choose competing retailers.
In related news, here's a county courthouse in St. Petersburg, Florida, submitted to our This Is Broken group on Flickr by geekman55855:
The wheelchair ramp just goes to a landing with more stairs.
These are good illustrations, but if you want to see real thoughtlessness and even apparent contempt for consumers in action, take a look at America's home health care industry that focuses on people like me - severely disabled or elderly.
When the customers and their overburdened families have little to no ability to protest/take their business elsewhere, a lot goes on that people who aren't literal shut ins can't imagine.
The Lexington Avenue Bloomingdale's building is more than 120 years old. If Wikipedia can be believed, it had its last major renovation in 1930. It may be impractical or illegal to add more lifts to the building.
That Florida courthouse doesn't look as if it's under a preservation order, though :-).
Even if the building is on some sort of historical preservation list, their way of dealing with customers impacted by lack of elevator access is appalling. Employee training needs some work, obviously.
Speaking as someone who has used a wheelchair his entire 42 years, I am really tired of hearing the "we're a historical building" argument. May as well hang up a "no wheelchairs allowed" sign. I'm sure there are some "no blacks allowed" signs left from the early '60s that could be repurposed for this. The feeling of rage and frustration to me upon seeing inaccessible buildings is the same.
When I was travelling with my daughter by train last summer, we encountered a broken elevator and were told to take the escalator. When I pointed out that there are signs saying that strollers were prohibited, they said I would need a porter. Foolishly, I thought that meant that they would summon one from the train station to the tracks. My sister who was in the station (she wasn't allowed to come to the tracks to help) finally found a porter and he came out. I was out of pocket for the tip, delayed because of the process but awfully glad that I'd been able to carry my daughter while the porter took his chances with the stroller on the escalator. I wonder what they would have done if there had been a person in a wheelchair. Trains in Canada are federally regulated and must offer service to all. I should have filed a complaint but lost momentum before the vacation was over.
In a building where I worked they were having problems with someone vandalizing the elevator, so they kept it locked with a sign on it to see security if you needed to use the elevator. Problem was the security office was on the second floor, so people who really needed to use the elevator couldn't because they couldn't get to the second floor to have the elevator unlocked. I tried to point this out to the head of security, but he failed to understand my point.