A well known supermarket chain is re-designing its stores to help hungrier shoppers, with help from experts at the hip-and-trendy design consultancy XL-NN.
An excitable creative from XL-NN (it’s pronounced ‘excellence’, apparently), said that there are many small things that can make a big difference for the hungrier shopper. These include wider parking spaces, bigger doorways, more robust trolleys, and stronger floors.
The problem is that hungrier shoppers, due to sub-optimal choices about diet and exercise, are not fit enough to get round a big store any more. For example, despite the obvious attractions of the pizza counter, hungrier shoppers are less likely to visit it if it’s at the back of the store. Lethargic shoppers are switching to smaller stores and larger shops are losing valuable trade.
Supermarkets see hungrier shoppers as a key customer group because food shopping is their main leisure activity. Hungrier shoppers shop more often, are big spenders, and are a large and expanding customer group. So supermarkets are spending heavily to keep their custom and provide them with a wide range of suitable goods.
Store re-design is an essential part of this – and it’s a game changer. Until now, the strategy has been to make shoppers walk as far as possible. This meant that bread was nowhere near butter, cheese was a long way from crackers, cereals far removed from milk, and so on. The new design puts related foods right next to each other. Another change is to put staple foods at the front of the store, so that crisps, pies, doughnuts, beer, fizzy drinks, battered foods, pastries, ready meals, and chips are easy to find. Products for less hungry shoppers – quinoa, vegan cheese, yuzu, kefir, kombucha and low calorie foods – are now at the back of the store.
A spokesman for the supermarket chain said, ‘We are confident that our investments to satisfy hungrier shoppers will feed through to the bottom line, in a big way.’
image from pixabay