I glanced through a couple parts of the report, so some things may be pointed out that I didn't see as I really didn't spend much time. But there were several things that made the overall conclusion questionable to me.
- 11,260 hours of store recorded video
- 11.5 hour average operating day
- 981 stores days covering 100% of the operating hours
- 620 stores visited
- 4,507 total stores
- 1,400+ part-time and 92 full-time workers participated in the observation and data gathering
So basically one or more persons sat in each store for 1 day and then a little under half the stores for 2 days. Were the days and the stores randomly chosen? You write this whole report based off of less than 2% of daily activity for a quarter and less than 15% of the total stores in operation? They threw out a confidence interval of 99% based on the number of receipts they got, but again, if the stores and days chosen were cherry-picked, the confidence interval doesn't mean anything.
I'm not saying LK is completely above ground, but an anonymous source for the report is very suspicious. And what firm has over 1,400 part-time employees and 90 full-time employees to work on essentially a two-day data gathering project for something like this?