It's actually an official task that you can see on people's schedules. So in addition to cashier, Uscan attendant, courtesy clerk, service desk person, etc... now there's greeter.
They started doing this recently. It's mostly courtesy clerks who do it, and some of the cashiers. Even a couple from Clicklist of they don't have anyone available.
They just stand by the door and say Hi and Bye to everyone that goes past them.
They used to have this at Marketplace and higher volume stores to be an deterrent for shoplifters. Your basically just there to say hi and bye and at the most maybe deter from people pushing carts full of product out the door. I thought they eliminated the position because of costs saving and liability, just like when they eliminate police details.
I have a hunch it's management's reaction to a customer review we recently had where a customer stated that one of the cashiers was talking to another employee and basically ignored the customer completely as they were standing there at the register.
They printed that review, highlighted it, and stuck it in front of the time clocks with the words "THIS CANNOT HAPPEN AGAIN!!!"
Ironic, isn't it? This, at a time when most people just want to get in, get their stuff and get back out----while dealing with as absolutely few other human beings as possible.
It was already bad enough how Kroger employees were forced to greet every customer walking by. The poor workers hated having to do that, especially the hot young females who were guaranteed drawing perverts all over themselves as a result, and I personally got sick of the unsolicited attention.
I sure hope this doesn't lead to an ISCE-type situation like we had when I worked for Office Depot (In Store Customer Experience.) It was a disaster and we had to greet every single person who walked into the store, we had to answer the phone a certain way and could not talk to customers off-the-cuff, it had to be a pre-arranged script for the situation. What I like about Kroger is that we do things as a matter of course that would have got us wrote up at OD-or fired. For example: customer stopped my manager after she clocked out. She told customer she was "off the clock" and instructed said customer to go to the customer service desk.
They also use the "Greeter" position to force people to acknowledge people. New Hires at one point were to spend 1/2 day greeting at the front entrances, I'm guessing they are trying to get people to talk to customers.
