How Automated Scanning Can Improve The Customer Experience In High Volume Retailing

By Rusty Hastings, Retail Industry Marketing Manager, Datalogic

If you are a fan of almost any sports team you have experienced periods where “your” team performed below expectations. Despite state-of-the-art training, new facilities, the best coaching, recruitment of top level talent, even new uniforms, the team makes rookie mistakes, doesn’t work together, and loses games they should be winning. In almost every case you can expect the coach to respond by saying something along the theme of, “We need to get back to fundamentals and do the little things that made us successful in the past.”

“Today’s consumers are demanding.” Almost every article on the state of retailing today echoes this theme. But is it really true? Perhaps what we mean is that shoppers today have more choices in where they shop, how they shop, and how products are delivered.

High volume retailers, supermarkets, hypermarkets, superstores, discounters, and warehouse clubs today must project their brand across multiple channels both in-store and on-line and they must compete against the on-line only retailers that offer viable alternatives to the regular trip to the grocery store.

Conventional wisdom says the grocery store must offer a better and more valuable shopping experience to draw shoppers to the store. Retailers have taken innovative approaches to store construction and re-models creating new boutique departments in-store, adding cooking classes, wine tastings, food demonstrations, digital promotional offers, and many other enticements to drive store traffic. These initiatives have indeed had a positive effect; however, one key part of the shopping experience has remained relatively unchanged and almost universally disliked by the shopper — the checkout, specifically, checkout lines.

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