Reimagined grocery checkout has lessons for CUs.
By Christopher Stevenson
For many in Wisconsin and Illinois, a trip to Woodman’s Markets, an employee-owned grocery chain, is a weekly ritual. For the uninitiated, Woodman’s stores are huge and offer a variety of foods not available at most other grocery stores at terrific prices. In a typical week, I can save upwards of 50 dollars on my food purchases by making the 20-minute trek to my local Woodman’s. That’s reason enough for me to love it. That said, a trip to Woodman’s has its challenges. The stores are huge and until you learn where things are, a simple trip to the store can be time consuming and frustrating. It’s swamped on weekends when people are stocking up for the week. Packer game days? Don’t bother. Pre-game, the store is packed to the gills with people in green and gold jerseys trying to cram in their shopping between church and kick-off. If you venture in after kick-off, the store looks like a swarm of locusts has swept through, leaving behind a few wilted leaves of lettuce and a couple Cheerios. Still, these challenges can be overcome once you develop your “Woodman’s Mojo.” After a few trips down the aisles, you get a better sense of where the double-stuffed Oreos are in relation to the ground flax seed. You learn to bob and weave, and slip between the carts of less accomplished shoppers with ease. Eventually, you just flow with the Woodman’s jetstream--a balloon on a gentle spring breeze. Easy. That is, until you hit the check-out lanes. In spite of the rows of full-service checkout lanes, as well as the half-dozen or so self-checkouts, when you get to the front of the store you will almost certainly be stuck in line waiting behind a busy mother of eight or youth camp director, pushing a train of two or three carts overflowing with a week’s worth of groceries to feed the masses. And your Woodman’s mojo? Deflated like a latex balloon on a cold winter’s day. That is, until just a few weeks ago.
Woodman’s has reimagined the checkout process with its new "accelerated checkout. This is not the typical, 15 items or fewer express lane or a glorified self-checkout. Nope. This is a full-service lane that customers with carts stuffed to the brim can use. It uses a 360-degree scanner that reads the bar code however an item is placed on the conveyor belt. That means the checker simply takes items out of the cart, places them on the belt, and the machine does the rest. Fast and easy. At the other end of the conveyor belt are three bagging stations and card readers. A display next to the card reader makes it easy to monitor the checking process so you are not double-charged for any of your items. Three or four employee-owners staff the accelerated check out. One person unloads the cart and places items on the conveyor belt or produce scale, one person monitors the sorter to make sure groceries go to the correct bagging area, and one person bags. The entire unit--conveyor belt, scanner, sorter, and bagging areas--occupies about the same area as two traditional lanes. And the entire check-out process is faster and more efficient. It gave me my mojo back. I’m no retail expert, but it seems to me that if you can get greater productivity with fewer staff members and improve your use of valuable retail space while enhancing customer experience, it’s a good business decision. What strikes me about the accelerated checkout is that it takes a customer pain point--the checkout process--and reimagines it from top to bottom. I’ve seen the 360-degree scanners in self-checkout lanes to make it easier for customers to serve themselves. Multiple bagging stations in a single checkout lane are common. Full-service checkout is as old as retail itself. But the accelerated checkout takes the best from each of these experiences and combines them into a single, highly efficient and consumer friendly solution. It’s just plain good consumer-centric design--good for the checker, good for the shopper, good for the store. This kind of effective design in business can be incredibly difficult because we already have systems that work (maybe not as efficiently or effectively as we’d like, but they work). We take an “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach and don’t explore how they can be improved. We look at our systems from our own perspective and do not put ourselves in the shoes of the user/consumer. Good design starts with empathy for the user and systematically trying to uncover desires, pain points, and values of the consumer. This is tough. This August at CUES’ Strategic Innovation Institute II at Stanford Graduate School of Business, the class will explore a systematic process for consumer-centered design and innovation. Students will roll up their sleeves and take a hands-on approach to innovation--large scale and incremental--and will learn ways to encourage a continual improvement process to boost efficiency and consumer experience. It’s this process that will enable credit union executives to create their own accelerated checkout. Good for the member. Good for the staff. And good for business. It will get your mojo running.
Christopher Stevenson is CUES' VP/professional development and innovation. Read a CUES Skybox blog post by a Strategic Innovation Institute I attendee Kris Van Beek, CCE. Read Credit Union Management magazine coverage of last year’s inaugural Strategic Innovation Institute I. This year's Strategic Innovation Institute™ I, hosted at MIT, is slated for Sept. 20-25. Graduates of Strategic Innovation Institute I can attend Strategic Innovation Institute™ II, hosted at Stanford. CU leaders who complete both segments of Strategic Innovation Institute and all assigned course work will earn the Certified Innovation Executive designation. The CIE establishes a standard of education and excellence for credit union leaders. Executives who earn this designation have made a commitment to developing innovative and strategic vision, and obtained a level of expertise recognized throughout the credit union movement.
