Curious George walks the aisle
The City of Orlando it is reported is considering a new Shopping Cart Ordinance.
The city might consider requiring new stores with more than 20 carts to have a cart retention system. Customers of Big Lots, for example, must pay a quarter for a cart. At Wal-Mart, a digitally encoded locking signal prevents shoppers from leaving the parking lot with the cart
Orlando is not the only city complaining about Shopping Carts that show up at the most unlikely places. From Oceanside CA to Victoria Canada Shopping Cart Containment measures seem to be the flavor of the season.
With all this focus on stolen and abandoned Shopping Carts, Retailers maybe thinking containment and perimeter security, but what about the Shopping Cart inside the store.
In last week's blog it was clear that Retailers have very little knowledge of what happens in-store with Shopping Carts as the value conscious shopper walks the aisles. But change is on the horizon with a few leading edge initiatives like Neilsen's PRISM, BestBuy's tests with Brickstream, Tesco's one-in-front initiative that uses thermal imaging.
But here is the challenge for solutions focused on monitoring in-store shopper traffic.
A survey on Australian shopping habits revealed that shoppers were not only venturing to their local more frequently, but were spending more time browsing in-store.
the average female spends 12 months of her time on Earth in shopping centres hunting bargains and buying everything from potato chips to the latest must-have patent heels. It found that for men shopping was generally a chore. For women, it was a pleasure
So its no longer about driving traffic in to the store and measuring traffic it is about making the browsing a pleasure or less of a chore depending on the shopprer profile.
This is where current technology solutions from cameras to infrared imaging to thermal sensing fall woefully short for they may provide a measure of traffic concentration in a section of a store or the total footfalls through an aisle, but they do not provide any insight into the browsing experience of the Shopping Trip from start to finish.
Without this corral to check out view of a Shopping Trip, any data of in-store traffic is about as insightful in understanding how the female shopaholic browses the store as studying an in-store random walk by a Monkey with a homing device on its collar.
So how can Retailers and Consumer Product Manufacturers gear up to understand the female shopaholic better to make those 12 months of a lifetime of browsing a pleasure ?
What disruptive innovations are out there which can give a corral to check-out, 360 degree view of the Shopping Trip ?
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