The more things change, the more they stay the same. Stephanie Clifford of The New York Times recently penned an interesting report entitled, Stuff Piled in the Aisle? It’s There to Get You to Spend More, citing several chain retailers that are making their stores messier with the objective of selling more.
Ms. Clifford references Walmart’s well-documented switch from clean aisles to "a little bit of mess" accompanied by the dismissal or reassignment of "the top executives who came up with the cleaner-stores plan." Other examples given were Dollar General raising the height of their shelves, J.C. Penney adding wall displays and Old Navy lining their checkout lanes with impulse items. Dollar General supposedly increased sales per square foot to $201 in 2010 from $165 in 2007 with their increased shelf height and "speed bump" aisle displays.
But all this is nothing new. Ms. Clifford, in fact, sees this as a reversal from the leaner/meaner approach taken during the recession. "Stack it high and watch it fly" was the famous mantra of Price Chopper and other northeastern supermarkets in the '70s and '80s. The huge Waccamaw Pottery of Myrtle Beach, SC is widely regarded as a very successful pioneer of both "discovery shopping" (finding must-have, limited-availability items on pallets around every corner) and the big box format, also in the '70s. During those decades it was common for supermarkets to feature "paper drops," in which they bought boxcar-loads of bath tissue and trucked dedicated semi-trailers around to their stores where cases and cases of heavily-discounted product were stacked and sold from outside the entrance to the store.
Dollar General's increase in shelf height used to be called "densing up" in the 90s when back rooms were built intentionally smaller to make selling floors larger, direct-store-delivery (DSD) became more prevalent and the Japanese practice of just-in-time delivery was widely adopted.
Ms. Clifford's report credits two "strategic reasons" for this clutter movement. First: "After years of expansion, many retailers are halting building plans and closing stores as sales and traffic shift to the web. That means the main way to increase revenue is by selling more stuff at the existing stores." And second, "same-store sales are getting stronger, so retailers are adding back merchandise." All of this, as Ben DiSanti of TPN retail marketing consultants was quoted as saying, is because, "If you have the temptations there, it will lead to additional sales."