Here is an excerpt of a letter sent to Roundy's regarding changes in their Woodbury Rainbow foods store:
As a student in the MBA Program at St. Thomas, I feel obligated to comment on your changing policies at the Woodbury Rainbow Foods. I believe I am qualified to give an opinion as in the past 10 years I have lived in New York, Maryland, and Minnesota, and have been a consumer at a variety of stores in those states. I was in the store the day a huge Roundy's field trip arrived, and I am of the opinion that management at Roundy's decided that the Woodbury store was an experiment in the making. The following are a short list of changing policies which I think are detrimental to your store.
1. Increased labor. Typically, grocery stores at the low to medium service level such as Cub Foods, Rainbow, and Super-Value, have relied on self-service bagging by their customers. This form of checkout requires minimal labor cost. Grocery stores such as Byerly's, Lunds, and Kowalski's, have provided bagging services, but at higher labor costs.
There are several effects which occur with this higher labor. First, is that with more employees in the bagging area, is that the impression of customer service of the store has fallen. Whereas previously, you only had clerks running the registers, now there is a huge group of student-aged baggers. Instead of appearing to help the customer, they are typically conversing amongst themselves, joking around, making you wonder why would you want to pay for this labor? If you go to Kowalski's, you will see baggers who are focused on the customers, who work independently, and leave joking and fun at least out of public view.
The next issue is that instead of making the checkout process smooth, now the customer has to wait for the bagger to bag his/her goods. The baggers do not appear to understand packing concepts. I have seen baggers with cold cough and wipe their nose. At least when the bagging is left to the customer, the customer has control over the packing layout, and any germs covering their foods are theirs alone. It also means one more place where the customer has to deal with an employee of your establishment, more likely negative than positive experience.
Employ the use of self-service lanes, remove the baggers, and if you want to promote more customer service, have a few customer service kiosks in the rest of the store. Today the Customer Service Kiosk in the Woodbury store was removed.
2. Poor layout. Cub foods in Woodbury has for a long time had a split layout. There is a fruit and vegetable produce part of the store, which is separated from the remainder of the store by a deli, which forces navigation between the two to a narrow corridor. This is one of the worst layouts I have seen and an important reason for our shopping at Rainbow foods. Rainbow had a logical layout, based on clean rows, and allowed several paths through the store.
Now it appears as though the management has looked at the Cub Foods in Woodbury and decided that the split layout is the way to go. The new Rainbow layout requires one path through the store, which is more ineffcient for the customer. Maybe your goal is similar to that of IKEA, to keep the customer inside the store as long as possible. As a customer, I want to get in and out as efficiently as possible.
Alternatives. As a customer, I see your increased labor costs are going to impact the prices I pay. If I have to spend more time in the store, and pay higher prices, I would rather shop at Kowalski's in Woodbury, where at least the employees treat me as their primary focus, and the store is interesting and visually appealling. If I am forced to spend too much time navigating a store, I may switch to Simons Delivers, cutting out the unnecessary labor, and poorly laid out real estate entirely.
Please consider your changes from the customer's point of view. If not, I fear your experiment in Woodbury will fail.