Tip Top Markets Case Study

City University of Seattle

Case #2 Tip Top Markets

Evelina Trevino Garcia

Executive summary

This case is about one regional chain supermarket in the United States “Tip Top Market”. Karen Martin is the manager of one of the stores and she noticed that there has been a lot of complaints especially on Tuesdays. Karen collected the complaint records from the store’s customer-service desk to know about these complaints. Because of these complaints Karen decided to make some changes in her store on July 15, these changes were supposed to help reduce out-of-stock complaints, improve store maintenance, and reduce checkout lines/pricing problems.

To analyze the issue better we will be using a check sheet, pareto diagram, run chard and cause-and-effect diagram. All the data that we have is based on the customer complaint records that the manager Karen collected on nine Tuesdays from June 1st to July 27th.

To analyze the data the first thing is the check sheet which shows that there are 184 customer complaints received during the past 8 Tuesdays, there are 12 categories for the complains.

• Out-of-stock: 61 complaints
• Overcharged: 18 complaints
• Poor store maintenance: 16 complaints
• Long check-out waiting time: 14 complaints
• Defective products: 12 complaints
• Uncomfortable store temperature: 10 complaints
• Meat not fresh: 9 complaints
• Wrong price/under charge: 8 complaints
• Could not find items: 8 complaints
• Employees not courteous/helpful: 6 complains
• Fish not fresh: 5 complains
• Others: 17 complaints

In this case, the category of “out-of-stock” is the one that has the most numbers of complaints at 61 complaints and “fish not fresh” being the one with the least number of complaints with 5.

The category “others” includes minor complaints like lost wallet, dislike store decorations, etc.

When analyzing the data in the pareto chart, it shoes that the category with most complaints in the store has 61 complaints from the customers. we can analyze that 20-80 where cause and effect activities and to reduce the effects there should be a reduction of the cause which is 20 percent.

[pic 1]

In the run chart we can see that the number of complaints received on every Tuesday move horizontally with no indication of going up or down in the following Tuesdays, and there is no indication that there could be changed on July 15. [pic 2]

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