Making the case for shopper time management
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Mark Heckman Consulting blog.
Ask any retailer what their shopper's average trip length is or how fast shoppers buy once they are in one of their stores, and you will likely get blank stares.
Aside from some attention to expedite the checkout process, retailers continue to assume that their shoppers relish looking for new ways to invest more of their time exploring aisles and alcoves, reading labels and scrolling through directories. In 2015, this is nothing more than a retailer's fantasy. As a result of this misguided mentality, store footprints have continuously grown over the years and, along with them, a corresponding decline in shopping efficiency.
As the chart below indicates, the faster shoppers buy, the more they buy. Conversely, the longer it takes for a shopper to make a buying decision, the less likely they will make one at all.
Source: Dr. Herb Sorensen, "Inside the Mind of the Shopper".
To put a finer point on it, food retailing study after study tells us that as much as 85 percent of the shopper's time is wasted navigating massive stores with extraordinary amounts of products, exploring and seeking, but not buying. Aside from the most ardent price shopper, "time" is the shopper's most prized possession.
Shopper time management should be the first logical step in a shopper centric merchandising plan. Dr. Herb Sorensen, noted expert on retail shopping behavior and author of the top-selling book, "Inside the Mind of the Shopper," lays out a new road map for retailers. He refers to this map as the "Five Vital Tenets of Shopping Behavior."
Every step of this process is focused as to how the shopper shops, not how retailers would like them to shop.
Source: Dr. Herb Sorensen, "Inside the Mind of the Shopper".
In high volume retailing, even step-wise, incremental gains in shopper efficiency can produce significant impact to the bottom line. It's time to incorporate the element of the shopper's time in the mix of merchandising metrics. Those retailers that do so will find their time-starved shoppers thanking them with more of their dollars and enduring loyalty.