Deciding on the position of the cash desk in a convenience store is something that might seem pretty easy.
Put it at the front where it can serve a dual function – preventing theft and giving shoppers the chance to buy something at the end of a trip round your shop. While this is fine if you are perhaps a single-aisle store where you can see the shoppers and they can see you, if a store is anything more than this, things are rather more complex.
‘In smaller stores, the counter is the focal point of the store,’ says Dominic Perks, managing director of Stoke-on-Trent-based design and shopfitting company UNO. ‘
When we design stores we often start with the look, feel and functionality of the counter and then work a specification up around it. In our business, 80% of the counters that we make are bespoke – they are for independent retailers who live behind their counters and have their own, often whimsical, requirements.’
The problem for most convenience store owners, however, is that - as in many other areas of retailing - the big supermarkets have begun a relentless push to colonise this sector. And they have done things differently.
For a start there are significantly greater numbers of cash desks – in a row for the most part. As might be expected they are sited towards the store exit, but according to Yaron Meshoulam, director at London design consultancy 20/20, many have dispensed with the conveyor belt with a checkout assistant waiting at the end of it. Instead, there is just room for a basket.
This saves space, meaning more room for stock in store, and more cash-desks.
All customers require checkouts where they will not be kept waiting and this is perhaps why the larger food retailers that have opened convenience stores have taken scaled-down versions of full-size supermarkets as the model that will give the best service for customers.
Take a walk around a Tesco Metro, a Sainbury’s Local or any branch of a Marks & Spencer Simply Food if you want to see examples of best practice in action. These formats may be beyond the means of all but the most affluent convenience store owners, but they will provide clues about ways of doing things better.
Competing with this is not easy, but if you are going to be anything more than a corner shop for evermore, the number, as well as the type, of cask desks that you have to offer will have a bearing on whether shoppers decide to frequent your store.
Good cash-desks are about getting shoppers processed quickly – it is purely a function of unit numbers and an efficient queue management system. Do it right and you will sell more, more quickly and have grateful customers.