Productive Boredom: What Sales Staff Can Do During Empty Sales-Floor Hours

Why sales floors have gotten quieter

Webrooming — researching a product online, then heading to a physical store just to buy it — has pulled most of the pre-purchase research phase away from in-store staff. Someone who webrooms shows up already decided, or close to it, and needs a lot less of a salesperson's time than a browser who wandered in cold. So sales staff end up with more dead time on the floor than the same job had ten years ago, even in stores that are still plenty busy by foot traffic.

The usual response is to fill that dead time with in-store tasks: restocking, cleaning, processing returns. Fine work, all of it, but none of it brings back the customers who are now researching online instead of walking in.

Redirecting idle time toward online demand

The shoppers a store seems to be "missing" during quiet hours haven't gone anywhere. They've moved online, into exactly the research phase webrooming describes. A few ways that idle staff time can actually reach them:

An unattended social account reads as an ignored one. A staffed one can answer a question fast enough to keep a webrooming shopper from wandering to a competitor's page instead. That alone is worth someone's attention during a slow hour.

More directly: the same expertise a salesperson gives someone browsing the floor can go to someone browsing online, over a live video call, with neither person traveling anywhere. This is the actual answer to a quiet sales floor — idle in-store time turns into billable online time. See how Oktium's Face2 button puts this on a business's own site.

And it doesn't require tying someone to a desk. A tablet, or even a heads-up display, lets a salesperson take a call from wherever they happen to be standing, so "available for a call" stops meaning "stuck behind the counter."

None of this is really about busy vs. quiet sales floors. It's about whether that staff time goes toward tasks with no path to a sale, or toward being reachable by the shoppers who are, right now, researching the exact same products somewhere else.