Herman School of Business
Those Extra Check-out Lanes
They say that retailers make most of their yearly sales at Christmas. Huge sums of money are spent on marketing, hoping to lure customers into the store. Products are displayed in their most attractive way. Big boxes with bows are everywhere.
As you drive closer to the place you want to shop you notice that so many others, like you, have the same idea. The parking lot is jammed with cars. That’s OK, my son-in-law loves stuff from this place and I will just slip in, buy a gift certificate, and slip out. No need for shopping throughout the store. No need to ask floor people questions about these technical gadgets I will never understand.
After the seemingly three mile walk from the last space on the parking lot I finally get to the front door. It’s the place where millions of others are walking in, most of them squawking out loud to no one, except they all have that thing wrapped around their ears. My techy son-in-law told me once they were the latest cell phones. I thought the loud talkers were just nuts like me. But, I digress, as I was now actually inside the store.
Holy technimoly. Look at all this stuff. Stacked floor to ceiling in aisles that never seemed to end. But forget all that. I was just popping in for the gift certificate. No wasting time shopping. No wasting time at all. In, boom… out. Now when a store like this big box baby is built someone pays a lot of money to a store designer who lays out the aisles, spaces out the shelves, sets up the ambiance if you will, so you can get a feel good shopping experience. Those extra large push carts can hold more product you know. That money was well spent as what seems like 50,000 customers are pushing all those carts they bought and planned for when the store was designed. Everything for maximum shopping possibilities, and massive sales.
The front of the store was designed as beautifully as the rest of the facility. Gleaming check-out lanes were built all across the front. I couldn’t count how many in total but they were spread out just as the designer had planned, ready for the flood of customers that the ads, and the products would force through these turnstiles, paying a flood of money into the many registers waiting there. The designer even put a little light at the top of each check-out lane so a customer would know where to bring his goods so he could whisk through, empty his wallet and head off to another store. I bet there were at least a dozen check-out lanes. Man, hats off to this store designer, for they had given the operator a chance to maximize his sales, and the customer a great shopping experience without wasting a minute of their time waiting in an endless check-out line. Waiting and getting pissed off more and more about the fact that waiting to get out of this store took longer than shopping for the stuff in the carts.
So. Can anyone tell me why a store with more than twelve check-out lines, clearly designed to get you in and out, only has six lanes open? The lines at this store were so long I walked out. I purchased nothing. They planned for success, and managed it into a failure.
What were those extra check-out lanes built for?
- Posted: 22 December 2007
- Comments: 0
- Category: Business failure
add a comment