I’m walking through a Loblaws Supermarket in Toronto yesterday and started thinking; “This is not an efficient way to sell stuff”. And this led me to thinking that 20 years or less from now, we’ll look back at how people used to shop for weekly sustenance. This Loblaws store is huge with; high ceilings, wide isles, fresh fish, a pharmacy, a bakery and was one of the first to offer self check out. All of this costs a lot of money to install and maintain and I have not as yet mentioned stock evaporation (aka shoplifting; one chain in T&T I know budgets 1 % of gross sales, so it has become a planned item) In spite of all of this at
Loblaws, the experience is pretty blah. You have thousands of choices but the experience is ordinary. It could be that I caught them on their recovery day after the weekend crowds. But I don’t think that’s the problem.
For me, Loblaws (and Hilo and Tru Valu) has two choices. Make a quantum leap on the quality of the customer experience or forget to pretend that you are offering any experience at all and become a super warehouse with much lower overheads.
On the first suggestion, they can improve the customer experience by thinking more about the end use of what they sell. So a chef and chefettes (chefs in training) would replace some of the existing job positions. There would be chef equivalents in other main grocery areas like Cleaning and Personal Care. Hostesses will roam the store and also serve as shelf packers. They won’t just help you find stuff but also help you think through how to make your kids lunch kit more interesting. The supermarket team will be re-engineered to deliver an experience to die for. Where will the money come from to pay them? It will come from a rationalization of the existing positions that have stopped adding value or who are under performing.
As for the Superwarehouse, here’s how it will work. You’ll go on your computer, select your shopping list, add to cart and then indicate if its pick up or delivery. After a while it will take you less and less time as you basically buy the same things in the same cycle. Then the only experience you’ll need is reliability and accuracy. The Superwarehouse can be super efficient by tracking customer purchases by item and adds up all customers’ orders which comes to the warehouse just in time. They can add some extras based on an items past sales performance, for those customers who are new to the area.
Spending all that money on such a beautiful Loblaws store and not giving a beautiful experience is not sustainable. Someone is going to figure it out sooner than later and my bet is that the Superwarehouse is likely to be the answer.
Loblaws 1985 commercial
