MRKT 4503 Week 1 Service Perishability Post Example

Week 1 Discussion: What Makes a Service Different From a Good?

The Lesson Hour That Cannot Be Sold Tomorrow: Perishability Explained Through One Empty Morning Slot at a Three-Branch Driving School

The Empty Slot

Picture the 7:00 a.m. slot on a Tuesday at Steady Wheel Driving School, a composite school with three branches and nine cars fitted with a second brake pedal on the passenger side. No learner booked it. The school still paid for that hour in several ways. Its instructor had arrived early because the morning schedule was built around a possible booking, and under the school's guarantee of four hours a day she is paid for the slot. The car sat fueled and insured in the lot. The route had been planned. At 8:00 a.m. that hour was gone, and nothing the school does tomorrow will bring it back.

Perishability and Its Neighbors

That is perishability, one of four traits the services literature uses to distinguish services from goods, alongside intangibility, inseparability of production and consumption, and variability (Zeithaml et al., 1985). A carton of motor oil left on the shelf on Tuesday can be sold on Wednesday; a lesson hour left empty on Tuesday cannot. The four traits are linked here. The lesson is inseparable from the learner, so the school cannot produce lessons in advance and store them for the busy after-school hours. And because demand for lessons peaks between 3:00 and 7:00 p.m. on weekdays and on Saturday mornings, the school carries idle capacity early in the morning while turning learners away in the evening.

Lovelock and Gummesson (2004) questioned whether these four traits really separate services from goods, noting that many services can be partly stored or standardized. Their alternative is that services are offerings in which customers pay for access or use without taking ownership. A driving lesson fits both accounts: the learner rents an instructor's time and a car for an hour and owns neither afterward. Zeithaml et al. (2018) treat perishability as the trait that most directly shapes how service firms manage demand and capacity, which is where the school's problem lies.

What It Means for the School

For Steady Wheel, perishability means the marketing problem is less about creating demand in general and more about moving it in time. A lower price for 7:00 a.m. lessons, a package that includes two early-morning drives or a push toward adult learners whose schedules are more flexible than teenagers' are all ways to fill hours that will otherwise be lost.

Question for Classmates

Where in your own work do you meet capacity that disappears if no one uses it, and what, if anything, does your organization do to fill it?

Reply to Keisha

Keisha, the unfilled dental hygiene appointment in your post fits perishability exactly, and you mention the practice texts patients when a slot opens. Does it offer anything to make the short-notice slot worth taking, or does it rely on patients who happen to be free?

Reply to Dev

Dev, you argued that a hotel room is the classic case. I agree, but your post adds something interesting: the hotel prices rooms differently by day of week. That is the same tool I suggested for early lessons. Do you know whether it fills rooms, or mostly raises the price of the busy nights?

References

Lovelock, C., & Gummesson, E. (2004). Whither services marketing? In search of a new paradigm and fresh perspectives. Journal of Service Research, 7(1), 20-41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670504266131

Zeithaml, V. A., Bitner, M. J., & Gremler, D. D. (2018). Services marketing: Integrating customer focus across the firm (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Zeithaml, V. A., Parasuraman, A., & Berry, L. L. (1985). Problems and strategies in services marketing. Journal of Marketing, 49(2), 33-46. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224298504900203