DISCUSSION
Hy-Vee uses tech and people to deliver a sense of awe in its stores
Written by Ronald Margulis
Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Mrschimpf
I got to chat with Randy Edeker, executive chairman, and CEO Jeremy Gosch of Hy-Vee, the 280-store chain in the Midwest, at the recent FMI Midwinter conference in Orlando.
Rather than ask about operations, competition or the financial shape of the company, I focused on technology and the customer experience. Here is the interview, edited for clarity.
What are the critical technologies grocery retailers need to be deploying right now and within five years?
Randy Edeker: Most of the discussion right now is really around retail media. This is a space that we're going to have to focus on that naturally couples with e-commerce capabilities. We've been in e-commerce for almost a decade now, but it continues to improve. On the back end, there's any number of tech assets, from forecasting supply chain, forecasting perishables and helping create just-in-time inventory systems around perishables. We've done a lot of work with shelf tags as a way of streamlining labor and taking costs out of the systems. We also need technology to improve self-checkout, reduce shrink and definitely employee communications.
Jeremy Gosch: When we opened Grimes (Iowa store), we put about 12 new technologies into it, including wayfinding, digital ordering kiosks, electronic shelf tags and recipe kiosks. There's a lot of different avenues that we can use to enhance the customer experience.
How is Hy-Vee using tech to help with its biggest challenges — labor and customer engagement.
Randy Edeker: We’re using Workday for communicating directly to our employees, giving them flexibility and how they schedule, even how they get paid. We've moved to a weekly pay and daily pay is our next move for employees. We're communicating much more digitally to our customers than we ever have in the past, and that's both a perk and a challenge because digital is so segmented it's hard to communicate to a large group of consumers at once.
How can grocery retailers best create “awe” in the store?
Jeremy Gosch: When you're talking about awe, we do it through purpose, we do it through product, we do it through experience, we do it through service, things that really come together to make an experience in the store that we hope is different than what everybody else has.