Eliminate the clutter at your convenience store and respect other categories, stressed Richard Poye, founder of Food Trends Think Tank, speaking at CSP’sCenter Store Forum on Wednesday in Lombard, Illinois.
Poye talked about how portable cardboard shelving promoting and housing a product, called a shipper, is sometimes placed in awkward spots in c-stores, blocking views of other store areas and products or hampering customer traffic flow in certain aisles—and thus reducing the chance of sales.
“You need to give space to your customers,” said Poye, showing slides of cluttered convenience-store floors—and food shelves and cases obscured by shippers at the end of aisles.
In one image, Poye said, the store had “13 shippers on the floor, three massive stack-outs—two of them in which the promotional timing of that had actually gone past—and five no-slip signs on the floor, and the floor was dry.”
Small, yellow wet floor signs “are disasters for customer flow,” Poye said, saying these signs will stop a customer from walking down an aisle.
In one store, wet floor signs near each end of an aisle, coupled with an end-of-aisle package beverage display, resulted in no one walking down the aisle for the 30 minutes Poye was in the location, he said.
Showing a slide of shippers shielding a foodservice area, he said, “This is not organized to me. This is chaos in merchandising. This is one angle, and it’s totally blocking the foodservice area, and this is a brand that wants to grow foodservice.”
He added, “Respect other categories. If you’re like, ‘I’ve got these shippers’ and you basically enrobe your foodservice area, you’re not being a good partner with your foodservice. Vice versa, you know, look at how the different groups work there.”
Another image showed a store with shippers directly across from the bean-to-cup area, creating a narrow aisle.
“People can’t walk through here,” he said. “I watched it. This is in the wrong space. You need to give space to your customers when they’re walking through.”
Consider Z racks
Problems with excessive shippers cluttering floors stem from “when you force merchandising onto your store manager, and they put a shipper in any place that it’s available,” Poye said.
For people who like shippers, “if you have to do that,” Poye said, get a Z rack, a heavy-duty portable rack usually made of metal and on wheels that can be used to display merchandise. “That thing will pay for itself in weeks.”
Put the Z rack close to the checkout area, he said. “When you need to mop the floor, you can actually move it out of the way and you can mop around it. They’re $300, or less if you buy them in bulk, and easy to put together.
“The benefits are you’re not going to have shippers clouding your floor, you don’t have your employees building the shipper boxes and you don’t have the waste of the cardboard,” he said. “Sales per square foot—fantastic.”
‘Why would you do that?’
In an image of a soda cooler at the end of an aisle, blocking the view of the aisle, the customer will enter the store, grab their refreshment, turn around and check out, Poye said.
“I hate these at the end caps because what they do is they stop people from going into your store,” Poye said. “And especially when you have more than a dozen [cooler] doors, why would you do that? Why would you force somebody to not walk through your store?”
Poye also asked why warm beer would be placed outside the beer cave on the store floor.
“If you have a beer cave and then you have stack-outs—nobody buys warm beer,” he said. “Get beer closer to the door. It’s easier to check out.”
In addition, he said, when people walk deep into a store and buy a case of beer, they won’t pick up other items.
“Get it closer to the door because you don’t want them to have their hands full where they don’t do an impulse purchase,” he said.
Stack-outs in the center of a store disrupt impulse purchases, Poye said.
“Place bulk items on the perimeters,” he said, adding that in the heat mapping with which he has been involved, people walking down side aisles only shop one side of the gondola.
“They don’t shop both, so by putting cases in the middle of an aisle, you’re reducing the overall impulse impact,” he said. “So, having the stack in the middle of two gondolas really reduces it. So that’s a challenge.”
Poye also questioned placing grocery and auto products on a shelf across from the cold vault.
“You’re buying a 20-ounce beverage and you’re turning around—you’re not buying motor oil,” he said. “Get the motor oil in a place that’s not a high-traffic area. People that need motor oil will find it.”
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