First UK click ‘n collect drive-tru

Tesco are launching Britain’s first drive-thru store at the Tesco Extra store in Baldock, Hertfordshire, tomorrow as a pilot.

The service is aimed at customers who do not want to carry out their weekly shop themselves, but who also do not have time to wait at home for an internet delivery.

Instead they will be able to drive to a dedicated area in a Tesco store at a set time and pick up their shopping without having to leave their car.

The service will be run by the Tesco dotcom team, with customers ordering their groceries online as if they were doing an internet shop, only they will then choose the Click and Collect option.

This will enable them to book a two-hour collection slot and they can pick up their shopping any time within this window.

They will then go to a reserved area in the car park, show a member of staff their shopping reference details and have their goods loaded into their car boot.

The charge for the service is £2, compared with a sliding scale of charges for internet deliveries which starts at £3.
Namtip: Scope to combine with a simultaneous petrol top-up by also offering the pick-up facility at Tesco forecourts?

Like-for-unlike Sales?

The way retailers report their like-for-like sales should be streamlined to reflect factors including the growth of online sales, or risk obsolescence of the measure, according to the KPMG/Synovate Retail Think Tank (RTT).

Currently there are no guidelines to how retailers should report like-for-like sales, which aim to provide a measure of underlying performance by taking out the impact on sales of new or closed stores. Retailers can choose whether they include figures on stores that are being refurbished, whether they include VAT, changes to products, discounts or promotions. That makes it difficult, says the RTT, to compare figures for different retailers.

There is also need for a consistent approach to reporting sales online and from other emerging channels.

RTT recommendations in new white paper:

-       website sales be included in like-for-like sales, except in the case of new website launches

-       trading updates for like-for-like sales should cover a standard period of time, especially over Christmas

-       excluding new and closed stores from like-for-like figures but including stores that are being refurbished

-       like-for-like sales figures should be provided both including and excluding VAT

-       any discounts should be reflected in like-for-like sales at the value that the customer paid

-       future money-off vouchers should only be taken into account at the point of redemption

Assessment of the health and value creation of a retailer requires a balanced view across a much broader set of metrics covering cash generation, profitability, and productivity.

Real issue is whether a retailer is attempting to clarify or obscure its real comparability with competition.

All else is detail….

Betting shops set to outnumber the High Street banks

Bookies are opening at a rate of 11 a month according to the Gambling Commission.

Banks, meanwhile, shut 14 branches a month, many offering up the space to betting shops.

The public may therefore be relieved to find that their access to the two types of gambling establishment remains almost constant, despite difficulties in distinguishing the two…

Think of it as the difference between private and public i.e. if a betting shop fails to make a profit, it goes bust, whilst a failing bank is bailed out by the public purse…its losses socialised whilst its profits are privatised… 

Minding the store…

Apart from the breakdown in civil order, recent riots have focused media attention on invasive shrinkage in retailing  

However, independent retailers can never afford to ignore ‘normal’ stealing by those with legitimate access to the store…

Shoppers spending £70 on groceries can feel that they deserve a small bonus in the shape of a bar of chocolate munched en route to the checkout…

In the same way, low-paid shop staff can form the opinion that inadequate wages somehow legitimise topping-up earnings in kind or from the till…

In other words, whilst it can be legally easier to trap a ‘real’ thief, apprehending someone who does not believe they are stealing presents a moral challenge…

In the case of a hitherto loyal employee, the case becomes even more difficult.

However, given that the theft of £10 from a shop operating on a 2% net margin requires incremental sales of £500 to recover the loss, an independent retailer’s survival can depend on increased surveillance of employees as well as shoppers..

In such cases there can be no grey areas…

Have an non-intrusive weekend, from the NamNews Team!

Charity Shops as Unfair Competition?

They have the potential to serve four purposes in that they offer a social service, enable the recycling of goods, help to raise awareness of the charity and provide a fundraising medium. With increased professionalism in their operations, competition has escalated for customers, goods and volunteers, both with other charities and with established retailers. With approximately 7000 shops generating £170m in profit and more than 160,000 volunteers nationwide, charity shops have several advantages over other retailers

-       80% business rates relief because of charitable status, often a tipping point towards liquidation for regular shops

-       Allowed to gift-aid their profits. This means they receive back the basic rate of tax paid by each customer i.e. the sale of a book in a charity shop for £4 would actually result in the charity receiving £5

-       Ease in paying high street rents. With low staffing costs (a typical charity shop will have one paid, full-time manager and around 16 part-time volunteers) means more of their turnover can go towards paying rent)

Next steps retail consolidation, increased political clout, more choosiness ref donated goods, and coping with some of the issues associated with swimming amongst the bigger fish?

Time for the OFT to check out the sector, if only as a warm-up exercise before reverting to major mults issues?

Understanding the aging consumer…?

As a brand’s consumer gets older, their perspective changes in all sorts of ways…the ‘simple’ aging process can make demands on a body that cannot be imagined by a younger person, until now.

To simulate what it feels like to be old, the above Mobilstrictor suit includes marbles sewn into socks, scratched goggles, straps and splints that make every move agony...after a few moments 40 year old reporter Jane Fryer complained ‘This is a bloody nightmare. My ankles ache, my hips are stiff, my feet are throbbing and my legs have gone all floppy and hopeless. I can’t lift either arm above shoulder height, my fingers are unwieldy and my sight is slightly blurred….’

The idea behind Howard’s ‘Mobilistrictor’ invention is to let able-bodied people experience what it’s like to be old.

Not to look old — but to actually feel old, with stiff joints, arthritic feet and horribly fumbly fingers that don’t work when you want them to.

Britain has an exploding elderly population, with more people over 65 than under 25. Over the next 25 years, the number of pensioners will more than double.

In fact, the figures released earlier this week show an astonishing increase in life expectancy across the generations, with babies born this year almost eight times more likely to reach 100 than one born in 1931.

And it doesn’t stop there — 23-year-olds are three times more likely to reach 100 than their grandparents, and roughly twice as likely to reach 100 as their parents.

In other words, if your brand has an aging user profile, it will become increasingly important to factor the realities of aging into actual use of the product and help your consumer in ways virtually impossible to imagine today…

Young savvy consumer for real insight?

A 10 yr old child demonstrated a series of flaws in mobile games at the latest DefCon hacker conference (!)

Going by the handle CyFi, the hacker presented her findings at the DefCon hacker conference held in Las Vegas.

CyFi discovered the bug after getting bored with the pace of farming games and seeking ways to speed them up.

As you know (!) many farm-based games force players to wait hours before they can harvest a crop grown from virtual seeds. As a result CyFi, started fiddling with the clock on her handset to see if she could produce crops more quickly….

She found that advancing the clock on a tablet or phone can, in many games, open a loophole that can be exploited.

The conference organisers now have a series of sessions aimed at a new generation of tinkerers….

A lesson for us all in tapping into the savvy consumer a little earlier, and really listening…?

End of the Shopper Receipt?

In the US,  major retailers, including Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom, Gap Inc. (which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), Anthropologie, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either e-mailed or uploaded to password-protected Web sites.

Retailers first considered e-receipts in the late 1990s, but the dot-com crash stopped most efforts.

In 2005, Apple introduced electronic receipts at its stylish retail stores. More mainstream retailers found the checkout system difficult to replicate and were concerned that most shoppers were not quite ready for such a technological leap.

However, with wider use of mobile phones for payments, as with Google Wallet, e-receipts will become standard.

In terms of creativity, Nordstrom are considering increasing appeal by adding a photo of the item to the receipt so that a shopper can add it to a Facebook wall

To overcome objections to use of email addresses, some retailers are uploading  purchase information to a password-protected site. Customers can search their receipts and eventually  review tallies of how much they spend on ice cream or shampoo.

Can you imagine the added plus for a Tesco to be able to link receipts and Clubcard data, and the downside for those who cannot?