Making Food Shopping Better

There’s a sense that supermarkets have almost gone as far as they can go in the U.K. and, more generally, in Europe as a whole. From Waitrose to Sainsbury’s, Tesco to Carrefour, supermarkets and hypermarkets have become places where the chances are good that the shopper will genuinely enjoy the experience. And a whole lot of money has been invested in making the aisles the domain of the discretionary purchaser.

Today, these are places you go to treat yourself and your loved ones as much as they are stores that deal in the mundane matter of staving off hunger. There is, however, a fly in the ointment which still threatens to undermine all of the best efforts of those whose job it is to make mass-market grocers “stately pleasure domes” – the final five minutes.

The one thing that remains to be cracked is the transaction process.  Standing in line waiting for the person in front of you to find their credit card, remember their pin number and then pack the articles they’ve bought into the reusable bags they’ve bought with them (we don’t have baggers on this side of The Pond), has ruined many shopping trips.

There are, of course, solutions that could be deployed to makes things more acceptable, from a Swedish manufacturer, which looks like an MRI scanner through which items pass on a conveyor belt and are automatically recognized, to “contactless” card terminals, things could be better. Except, more often than not, the pursuit of profit in the face of seemingly ever-declining margins means that this type of implementation does not happen.

Yet, if things were automated, there would be fewer grumpy staff members and shoppers, more reasons for frequent shopping trips and a better chance of a feel-good factor being attached to the food-shopping journey. Just a thought, really, but it would help, and might mean increased sales. 

John Ryan is a journalist covering the retail sector, a role he has fulfilled for more than a decade. As well as being the European Editor of VMSD magazine, he writes for a broad range of publications in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany with a focus on in-store marketing, display and layout, as well as the business of store architecture and design. In a previous life, he was a buyer for C&A, based in London and then Düsseldorf, Germany. He lives and works in London.