The Warby Parker Paradox
Missing human connection
“Can you please turn your head to a side so I can see your ear?”, she asked with a competent smile.
I obliged.
“And, the other side?”, she continued. “Yes, I can see that they are loose. May I take them off your face?”.
Dressed in a loose black cardigan and with her hair pulled into a compact bunch, she truly cut a picture of sophisticated grace. In my previous stories, I had shared the story of an old gentleman who worked with enthusiastic curiosity that was charming. The young woman at Costco exuded the same energy. It was a joy to watch her work with care and pride.
What struck me most was the curiosity and energy with which the older gentleman helped me. In my previous experiences at this same facility, I had only witnessed bored looks and empty words of ‘how can I help?’. But, here was someone who took pride and did it with genuine joy. I am still amazed to this day.
Costco repairs your eyeglasses for free. So, even if she did a shoddy job with my repair, I can’t do much about it. What motivates a person to do such a careful job even though they don’t get paid for it? How often do we come across attitudes like “It’s not my job or I failed to see how it’s my problem?”
When DoorDash rolled out its WeDash program, one of its 400,000$ paid employees took to the ‘Blind’ site to complain
“Mandatory ‘WeDash’ starts from next year. You need to dash once a month. WILL BE TRACKED IN PERFORMANCE REVIEWS!! What the actual fuck? I didn’t sign up for this, there was nothing in the offer letter/job description about this,” the post said — Doordash employee on Blind
I am not advocating that people work for free. It is more about admiring people finding joy in their job without it just being about the reward. I don’t think I am doing a good job of explaining the exact feeling I want to communicate.
As she wrapped up fixing the frame, she handed them back and asked me to repeat the process. “How are we looking? Do they feel right?”. “They feel wonderful”, I answered truthfully.
I bought my glasses from Warby Parker. There is an interesting TED talk by the famed organizational psychologist Adam Grant. You can watch it below.
The traditional sense of accomplishment (/merit) or what something needs to look like confounded Grant in his assessment of Warby Parker. Warby Parker took some time but they were able to solve a big barrier towards ordering glasses online. Having bought my glasses from them, I know they did a good job in solving that problem. They streamlined the ordering process and beat the prices from Walmart or Costco handily.
But, when it came to servicing my glasses, it seems like a brick-and-mortar store has the upper hand. Online stores that rise to distinguish themselves from brick-and-mortar stores always seem to come back to some form of a physical store. Even Amazon with plans to open up unique stores or leverage Whole Foods to get some of its services out, cannot seem to get past this physical limitation so easily.
The ease with which I could walk into Costco to get a simple repair done will be hard to overcome for an online business, right? Could Instant delivery be a path to solve such service-related issues? There is a growing concept of ‘dark stores’ — warehouses that are set up for the explicit reason to get instant delivery. For straightforward things, like groceries, there is a strong push towards cutting down the delivery times to crazy values (less than ten minutes, seriously?)
Even if they could solve this problem by doing same-day delivery service, it still seems cold and distant. If I was not happy enough with my fit, the person in front of me can iterate till they get it right. The feedback is instantaneous. Somehow, I fail to see how an online service can match it. So, I went and searched to see if Warby Parker caved and opened up any store. It turns out — they did!
It seems like no matter which industry we talk about, it might go online for many parts but we return to some physical anchor, one way or the other. Especially, with the pandemic where we have avoided human contact, for the most part, physical stores will hold even more meaning as a way to regain normalcy.
“Alrighty then! You have a wonderful day”, she beamed. “Thank you very much”, I replied. And, I meant it.
