Today’s Checkout

As President George Bush, Sr. discovered, a lot that goes-on at the checkouts lanes in grocery and alcohol beverage stores is not readily apparent. In a typical day, stores:

• Maintain prices for 10,000-75,000 different products and “deals”
  
  
• Coordinate “cash register prices” with “shelf label prices”
  
  
• Manually order and receive thousands of products
  
  
• “Ring up” thousands of items for hundreds of customers at multiple checkout lanes
  
  
• Track multiple payment methods: cash, checks, credit/debit cards, coupons, store credit and government subsidy programs such as WIC and food stamps—while attempting to minimize bad check and credit losses
  
  
• Collect and track sales tax, deposits, and container taxes/deposits
  
  
• Control products returned by customers. Ship hundreds of damaged products to suppliers for credit.

Automation in these stores lags far behind other industries. Grocery stores, in particular, are complex, low-margin operations that are under pressure to catch-up. The vast majority of grocery stores do not keep up-to-date shelf inventory. As strange as it may seem, modern-looking bar code scanners at supermarkets rarely control inventory. They just look up prices.

This is true even in progressive supermarket chains such as Safeway. Despite its modern image, Safeway does not have perpetual in-store inventory information.

The inability to keep inventory records allows more “shrinkage” than would otherwise occur. Lack of inventory records also reduces profits in other ways. Reordering stock is unnecessarily labor intensive — personnel walk the aisles, taking counts. Inaccurate ordering information results in too much stock on some items (excess inventory cost) and outages on others (lost sales). Stores cannot answer on-line queries, either from shoppers or from buyers at headquarters, about which items are in-stock. CRISP gives the answers in realtime.

Grocery stores use a combination of manual and automated methods to compile reports. Retailers bemoan that reports are inaccurate and are labor intensive to prepare. Sales, inventory and operational data are typically one month old, or worse. Unnecessary costs result, which leads to higher retail prices. CRISP software supplies realtime on-line information managers want but have not been able to obtain.

See CRISP n’ Lean