Do you have a cell phone policy in your store?

We don't. My employees leave their cell phones with their coats and things. We don't get terrific reception in the store with all the lights, so when someone's cell phone rings I usually say “you may need to take that outside or you might lose the call.” Some of them work and some of them don't. We see a lot of people shopping with someone else who is on the other end of that phone, saying “Okay here's this, this is what they have.” We have seen a lot more of that than we had in the past, or someone coming in the front door with the cell phone already on. They're picking up something for someone else and getting the instructions, and after they're done with that we can interact with them. People don't stand around and just talk, or if they do they go to the corner and have as much of a private conversation as you can, or just flip it off and call back later. That hasn't been an issue for us at all.

Yes, we do. We actually have two of them. We have a cell phone policy for staff: it's that all cell phones are turned off upon arrival at work. We do not have one for customers. We have been tempted, because it's annoying and disruptive, and you hear a lot of interesting conversations that you really don't want to hear. However we have a really strong, clear policy that we will never have any negative signs in the store, no matter how much we don't like something customers are doing. We would never post a no cells or a no returns or don't touch. We want all signs to be positive. So we have cell phones, we have dogs, we have people coming in with ice cream cones and cokes and sometimes even glasses of wine. My wife has been tempted to have a cell phone jamming device, but they're not legal.

No, I've never even considered doing such a thing. We have so many people who walk in to the store with those little Bluetooth ear pieces on, and if we told them to take their calls outside, we would never hear from them or see them again. Luckily, cell conversations disturbing other customers hasn't been a big problem for us. Lots of people just wander around and shop while they talk on their cell phones. Whatever keeps them occupied, I guess. But employees is a different story. For them, the policy is definitely “while you're here, you're not taking your calls.”