Event overview
For decades, the checkout has been one of retail’s most valuable pieces of real estate for those items the shopper forgot, or simply fancy right now. For the retailer, they benefited from a simple formula: a captive shopper, a few moments of dwell time and products placed within easy reach.
Then came self-checkout.
Today, the shopper is no longer simply waiting to pay. They are working: scanning, weighing, responding to interventions, finding produce, managing bags and navigating payment. At the same time, retailers are trying to improve throughput, reduce errors and losses, and make increasingly constrained self-checkout spaces easier to operate.
So where does impulse fit in this new world?
There is certainly no settled answer.
Some retailers are making the self-checkout itself virtually impulse-free, using snake queues and the journey into the checkout area to create the selling opportunity. Others are bringing merchandise right up to individual self-checkouts. Different approaches can be seen across countries, formats and retailers, while digital screens and retail media potentially create entirely new opportunities to influence the shopper before the payment.
For merchants responsible for selling some of the most valuable square metres in the store, the economics and design principles are changing.
And for CPGs that have historically competed to buy this space, there is an equally important question: “what exactly are we buying now?”
In this SCO working group meeting we will explore the selling of Impulse in the Age of Self-Checkout, looking through three different lenses:
The Shopper – How has the psychology and opportunity for impulse purchasing changed?
The Store Operator – How do merchandising, customer flow, speed, accuracy, loss and colleague workload coexist?
The Merchant & CPG – Where is the new valuable real estate, how should it be designed and measured, what might digital screens and retail media add? And for CPG’s, how is any investment measured (more sales?) and the ROI evaluated?
Expect to hear case studies from retailers and CPG’s, where they will share learnings, design thinking, results and data. Plus new insights from shopper psychology research.
This is a retailer, CPG and academic only meeting.
