Retailers using new tricks to keep the lines moving
Self-checkouts, ‘line rushing’ help speed Boxing Week purchases
Paying with credit card, debit or smartphone may not end checkout lineups, but time is money and many retailers aimed to speed things up from the start of this holiday shopping season, and right through Boxing Week, with line rushing, robotic pickup towers and increased checkout strategies.
With the rise in e-commerce trade, companies like Walmart, Best Buy and Canadian Tire have been focused on getting customers in and out of their stores quicker and making shopping easier in order to keep pace with major online competitors like Amazon.
Since last year, U.S. retailers like J.C. Penney, Macy’s, Target and Walmart have had their staff check out customers paying with mobile devices and credit and debit cards in their store aisles to make shopping and paying quicker, and it’s a practice we’ve been seeing more of here.
“To ensure a faster and more efficient shopping experience for our customers this holiday season, our stores implemented a practice that was well-received last year, known as line rushing,” said David Fisch, Walmart Canada’s vice-president of customer experience and operations strategy.
“Line rushing allows an associate to scan and bag a customer’s purchases while they are in line. The associate provides a slip to the customer who then presents the slip to the cashier for payment,” Fisch said.
Fisch said that extended shopping hours, increased cashier staff, easy online ordering, home delivery and customer pickup options are all part of Walmart Canada’s overall plan to make shopping quicker and easier.
Introduced about 15 years ago, self-checkouts took a bit of time to get used to for some people, but younger shoppers, raised with computers, tablets and other devices, jump on e-commerce trends.
Walmart and Canadian Tire are banking on self-serve robotic pickup towers to draw more online business and cut lineup delays in their stores. Customers order and pay online, get an email notice when the order is ready and arrive to have their order code scanned and items dispensed from the automated in-store tower in less than a minute.
Canadian Tire has them in five stores — in Calgary, Saskatoon and Vancouver, and two in Toronto — in a pilot project; and Walmart, which has them in more than 700 U.S. locations, was set to begin rolling them out here in Canada in the new year, beginning with two locations, in Mississauga and Oakville.
Staff at Best Buy have been processing customer purchases at the main checkout and in the various departments throughout the store to reduce lineup wait times. Online ordering, home delivery and customer pickup choices also factor in their business plan.
“During busy times, such as key holiday dates, we add staff to these department checkouts,” said Thierry Hay-Sabourin, senior vice-president of ecommerce and information technology at Best Buy Canada.
“Nearly half of all Best Buy Canada online purchases are made with ‘Reserve and Pickup’ — 1.6 million orders last year,” he said, adding that system will be available via Google Assistant so customers can shop from their devices by voice command.
In Canada, the chain was expecting up to 65 per cent of its customers to shop via their smartphones over the busy year-end shopping periods.
David Soberman, a professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, thinks increased use of technology in retail is more about keeping up with major online competition than cutting employee numbers.
“To some degree, technology might reduce workforce costs of retailers, but the main thing is less loss of business to pure online retailers, which is the real threat to companies like Walmart and Canadian Tire. Even if it doesn’t reduce the workforce, it might reduce the amount that Amazon hurts you.”
He said savings are made when retailers boost e-commerce trade and decrease their cash transactions, as handling hard currency is time-consuming.
“The more efficient retailing becomes, the more money and time we have to spend on other pastimes in which we interact with other people. I may not have the interaction with a checkout person at a store, but if over the course of a year, this saves me two hours that’s two hours more I’m able to spend with friends and family.
“If you go back earlier in the 20th century, people would spend a lot of time going to the butcher, baker and the green grocer, and they’d know each person and chat with them ... Now people do their shopping really quickly but have time to take their kids to a soccer game and do other things.”