Neuways’ Post

'📢Sainsbury’s trials larger self-checkout tills to boost efficiency💪 Sainsbury’s is piloting larger self-checkout tills as a replacement for human cashiers💼, following its CEO’s remarks about the need to make stores “more efficient.” 🏪💼#RetailTech #Efficiency #Sainsburys 🛍️ Need more insight? Check out databoutique.com - the largest source for public data in retail! 📊🌐 #DataInsights' by Retail Gazette about Sainsbury's

What's the best way to make the quick comm model work in the UK? The burgeoning partnership between Morrisons and Just Eat makes sense on many levels, offering shoppers a service which they will be genuinely happy to pay for. Quick Comm works where there is a clear shopper benefit that can be monetised which in turn makes the P&L healthy; it does not work where there is an assumption that shoppers will pay for groceries in a hurry when, let's face it, they don't really need to. How well is your business set up to make the most of its Quick Comm opportunites? Or indeed those presented by any eCom subchannel. If you don't know the answer to that question then please get in touch! #quickcomm #morrisons #justeat #rapiddelivery #groceries https://lnkd.in/eTJXi2AQ

Have we reached the limit of self-service? Asda certainly thinks so. The supermarket is spending £30m on increasing staff as it battles to win back market share. It goes to show the importance of customer experience in retail - and the human touch goes a long way in helping consumers feel welcome. #customerexperience #retailexperience #selfservice #retailinsights https://lnkd.in/eQhGXfwA

Whats going on with Retail Outlet Payment Systems in the UK this week? Greggs outlets are down for payments! More payment issues for retail chains in UK forcing stores closures or customers to go cashless in stores; “X”lighting up again in a very cashless society. Two major grocery chains this weekend, and now this outlet hit with payment processing issues! Greggs has over 2,000 outlets across thr UK. More testing issues, poor change control, or just a lack of investment in solid real-time payment or data center archiitectures?

Hallelujah..... I have been posting about this for a few years now and good to see retailers re-thinking self service checkouts. Waitrose & Partners new self service checkouts refit two years ago was awful. Smaller checkouts, errors a plenty, not enough staff to fix error codes, not big enough to hold a basket, confusing to the elderly. Ghost staffing in smaller stores re partners on the Till. Old Brompton Road case study if Waitrose management even care. Partners were sometimes in tears due to stress the new checkouts caused. Asda take note, a lovely lovely guy in my local ASDA should get an award for his good humour in the self service chaos zone. Process failures abound.... 1. Let's save the planet, I have brought my own bag 2. Oops the store assistant needs to verify it actually a bag. 3. The first item in the bag sometimes doesn't register on the own bag selection, the assistant is coming. 4. When you are finally all packed the system prompts how many bags 🤦♂️ 5. So customers now checkouts all goods, pay and them waste everyone's time by repacking in their own bag. 🤷♂️😱 I could quote similar process failures in most supermarkets. Even one of my retail hero's Richard Walker OBE of Iceland Foods fame, The Food Warehouse. Great concept, my daughter and I used it alot during covid in Chester. Alot to choose from, but small cramped sub optimal checkouts make the payment process overly cumbersome. However the prices points on so many items make it worth it. Many elderly and disabled have major challenges with self service checkouts so we'll done Morrisons for saying you went to far. Let's get back to some good old fashioned checkouts with Humans, a bit of banter and a better customer experience. #customer #consumers #retailers #experience https://lnkd.in/eUGHJyJF

They say bad things happen in 3s - first there was McDonalds, then Tesco & Sainsburys, now Greggs! 🤣 Why should an IT outage mean a business essentially shuts down? These businesses need to realise how critical IT is and get their business continuity up to the task! Think about all the other areas of a business that have solid multi-layer redundancy systems in place... one would argue that most companies today are *less* vulnerable to shut-downs because of staff absence than they are because of a random bit of software going a bit funny. That's crazy! IT is easy, it's just incredibly complex. Complex things need to be broken down. Our Infratech model does that. 5 Pillars, 5 Layers, 5 States. Simple. #ITInfrastructure #EnterpriseArchitecture #BusinessContinuity

NEW: Asda is to put more staff on checkouts in a scramble to win back market share, after admitting the expansion of self-service technology had reached its limit. The supermarket is spending £30m on increasing staff hours as it battles to stem falling sales. This includes increasing the hours in which staff will work on manned checkouts as part of a broader push to make its supermarkets more appealing. Michael Gleeson, Asda’s chief financial officer, said: “I think we have reached a level of self checkouts and scan and go where we feel that works best for our customers, and we feel we’ve got the balance just about right. “We have invested additional hours in manned checkouts and that’s been within the existing physical infrastructure [of the stores]. It’s not more checkouts, it’s more colleagues on checkouts.” It follows a broader backlash against self-checkouts from customers who have argued that a reliance on the technology is ruining the shopping experience. Some supermarkets have gone as far as ditching self-checkouts. The upmarket grocer Booths last year replaced self-checkout machines with human cashiers in all but two of its 27 stores. 📰 Read more via The Telegraph https://lnkd.in/euJkPKmj

🛒Self-service #checkouts at supermarkets are driving the increase in #middleclass #shoplifting of #luxury foods, the boss of one of the UK’s biggest smoked salmon producers has said. Lance Forman, chief executive of H. Forman & Son & Son, believes opportunist thefts, rather than the cost of living #crisis, are behind the rise in #retail crime, which has reached a record 1,300 offences per day according to the Office for National Statistics (#ONS). He said: “Self service really annoys people, especially older customers, and they think that if you are not prepared to protect your goods you can’t care about them too much. “If you leave your front door open, people will come in and steal. It’s a sad fact of life.” Mr Forman, a former #Conservative MEP, told The #Telegraph that retailers had lost sight of their customers’ desire to be served by people, rather than machines, and that “the idea that everything can be #tech driven is wrong”. Retailers are increasingly asking #customers to do the work that paid #staff once did, by scanning their own items at checkouts that in some stores have completely replaced manned tills. The number of self-checkout machines in the nation’s supermarkets has risen from 53,000 to 80,000 in the past five years, and there are fewer jobs being advertised for #checkout staff. Read more here👇 https://lnkd.in/evBsVmZZ

ModernExpo_retailnews Morrisons plans to remove some of its self-checkouts as CEO Rami Baitiéh admits that the technology has been overused. According to The Telegraph, the supermarket is re-evaluating the balance between self-checkouts and manned tills and intends to eliminate some from its stores. Baitiéh stated that while self-checkouts improved productivity, many customers, especially those with full trolleys, disliked them. The increase in self-checkouts has also led to an increase in shoplifting, prompting Morrisons to analyze the technology's impact on its stores. The CEO mentioned that after reviewing their stores, they found that 20 of them needed a better balance between self-checkouts and manned tills. For example, he pointed to a store in Brough, Yorkshire, where customers and employees were happy with removing some self-checkouts in favour of four new manned tills. This move by Morrisons contrasts with the industry trend, where supermarkets have been gradually replacing manned checkouts with automated self-service tills. Morrisons's decision also diverges from the strategy of many other grocers, such as Sainsbury's, which recently signed a deal to upgrade its 22,500 checkouts with new technology. #ModernExpo #wearemodern #wecreateretailnew #GoModern

In this day and age it is inevitable that IT problems will strike at some point. Just this last week, Sainsburys, Tesco and McDonalds have been affected. The key requirement for retailers with 3rd party systems is instant, direct and informative account management. Managing expectation for your staff and customers is critical to minimise the impact, immediately and longer term. If you are using payment gateways or retail systems where you have no designated account manager and find it hard to get in touch when things are going well, imagine when it goes wrong... Having one fully integrated system with embedded payments can be hugely beneficial in crisis management. https://lnkd.in/e9ZzzC4B #retailsystems #embeddedpayments #customerservice #accountmanagement