A Sephora Store Went Viral for Color-Coded Baskets Meant to Help Shoppers
Ask any introvert, curmudgeon, or person in a hurry what they hate most about in-person shopping and they'll all come back with the same answer: You have to talk to someone. Sure, there are days you actually need a salesperson to find what you want, but sometimes you just want to put your hoodie up, buy your spot treatment, and scurry back home. One Sephora store in Europe is trying to figure out which of these moods you're feeling before a salesperson even approaches.
Sephora shopper and Twitter user Cami Williams snapped a photo of two basket options at an undisclosed Sephora location: The red baskets indicate "I would like to be assisted" and black baskets mean "I would like to shop on my own." The color-coded system saves everyone time; certainly, Sephora would rather its employees spend more time with the people who actually want help, instead of approaching customers who will wave them away. But more importantly for shoppers, it could help them avoid an anxiety-producing experience with a store employee.
"There is a fellow introvert on the Sephora customer experience team who deserves a raise right now," Williams wrote.
A Sephora representative confirms to Allure that the baskets are found in European Sephora stores. But people on Twitter have chimed in to say that Sephora isn't the first store to test out color-coded baskets. Korean skin-care brand Innisfree reportedly has the same system with red and green baskets.
The Sephora photo has been retweeted thousands of times, with plenty of praise from introverts. But as an Ulta employee wrote in, we have to consider that salespeople are just trying to do their jobs. "I work at Ulta. We can never win! Whenever we're overly friendly, people get mad at us. When we don’t ask as much, the next day we see a negative survey saying no one in the store was there to help. What the heck are we supposed to do?" she wrote. It's a fair question — and perhaps one that a little color-coding can help solve.
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
