Morning is usually the time older people choose to do their shopping, since they don’t work and they want to avoid congestion and long queues that occur in the afternoon. The plan was to follow 4-5 old people from the time they entered the shop and grabbed their trolley to the point they paid and left the store. I arrived at the store at 11am and got myself a trolley and started going round the store pretending I was shopping groceries, hoping they wouldn’t suspect that they were being followed!
Outcome
I was surprised to see that no one followed the order in which the products were written in their list and all of them returned to an aisle they’ve been before to get some other product that came later in the list. This means that they neither shop in the order the products are written down nor do they make sure that there are no more products in an aisle they need before they proceed to the next one. This simply leads to extra walking, tiredness and delay. Three of the old people were going around in the store to find a specific product or food and in some cases it took a total of 15 minutes to find it. The total shopping time for each individual ranged from 50mins to 1h20mins including checkout time.
Suggestions
- Total shopping time can be minimised by:
- Giving directions to the customer for finding a specific product
- Constructing a time-efficient shopping-route according to customer’s previous purchases. The customer would have the option to modify the route by adding or removing products.
- Checkout time can be reduced by adding some functionality to the trolleys that will allow customers to scan items before putting them in the trolley and pay using their cards as soon as they finish. No need to queue.
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