Picture a standard day. You're at work, doing your job, with things going smoothly along just as they do every single day. Then, about two hours before your shift ends, your boss comes up. You get some patronizing drivel about what a good job you're doing that instantly sets off your internal alarms. Why? Because your boss only ever tells you what a good job you're doing right before asking for a favor. Then it comes. The one thing you never wanted to hear.
Your boss is ordering you to stay late to make the place look nice. Why? The CEO will be on-site tomorrow.
Perhaps one of the most feared and hated things for retail workers is called the "store visitation". It's where a group of corporate-appointed executives come to a physical store with the express purpose of making everyone working there as miserable as possible, finding fault with everything they can, and searching for the best boot-lickers to bolster their egos. Okay, that last part isn't always true, but the other two certainly are. Whether or not they admit that is the intention, store visits inevitably raise stress levels for everyone working in the store.
No matter what a store does, or how high its sales numbers are, or how successful it is in retaining customers, the visitors will inevitably find fault. Visitors will focus on everything they feel a store is doing wrong and compare it with disfavor to other stores, regardless of whether or not the store being visited actually deserves the criticism. Or even why those faults exist in the first place. It's like being a middle child, only without ever being able to grow up and move out of your parent's house.
I'm positive the concept started with good intentions, but unfortunately the old saying about roads to bad places being paved with them has held true in this case. Most likely it was meant to get corporate employees to connect with stores, to see the bigger picture and be better informed and able to make the decisions needed to improve profits for the company. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out that way. The biggest flaw with this approach is that people who come in aren't interested in keeping in touch with what happens at the store level. They're focused on the company as a whole. Their ideas for change don't always make sense, and when they have us move product around like confetti at a party it just irritates customers. We do them anyway, because we don't want to get fired, but we know they won't work.
Add to that the extra burden of employees suddenly scrambling, working extra hours to try and make stores "look perfect" even though that's a physical impossibility, and then the disheartening reality of having someone look at twenty hours of work and scoff and go on about how they would have had it done differently... It hurts. It hurts employees who just poured hours of labor into trying to impress to have that work insulted, degraded, or ignored. Again, like the middle child, constantly searching for some shred of parental approval and validation only to be knocked down time and again by what a sibling has done better or how unimpressed the parent actually is.
In the end, they are a waste of money, time, and health. They don't "reconnect the corporate executive with the customer"; they don't "give corporate teams a chance to communicate directly with the teams they manage"; and they certainly don't "provide transparency to employees about the company purpose and message". Employees pour everything they have into making a good impression.
No matter what, though, it's never good enough.