Anglia Co-operative continues to enjoy the benefits of self service tills
Self service tills are helping the Anglia Co-operative group squeeze the maximum trading space out of many of its smaller stores where square footage is at a premium.
By Glynn Davis
Speaking at the recent Wincor World event in Paderborn, Germany, Richard Feest, head of IT at Anglia Co-operative, suggested the most pressure in the group’s stores was to increase trading space and that a solution for this was to install self service tills that have a significantly smaller footprint than conventional checkouts.
“At the moment we are going for a mix portfolio of store and in smaller stores there is pressure on giving over more space to retail. This involves smaller self service checkouts and smaller hardware. Self service is certainly not about replacing people on the shop floor,” explains Feest.
At the group’s most recent store in Ely, Cambridgeshire (which covers a typical 10,000 sq ft) he says the latest version of Wincor Nixdorf self service checkout technology has been installed – comprising three smaller and four larger variants. These take up the same space as five older versions of the devices.
They sit alongside four standard checkouts and two kiosk tills at the separate cigarettes and confectionery counter. The mix of different tills is down to some number crunching that Anglia Co-operative undertakes based on its experience of the take-up of self service tills and the sales patterns at stores through the week.
“We crunch the data and use labour scheduling to tell a store what people are required at the front-end. We could force a high number of people through self service but then we get a lot of complaints so we don’t do this,” he explains.
Thankfully, for the Anglia co-op, they do not have to force people to use the self service option as Feest says the company benefits from high adoption rates of the technology – between 45 and 60 per cent of its customers prefer to pay this way. This is an impressive number when you consider that only 30 to 40 per cent of its tills are self service in the 15 stores that it has the technology.
“We’ve been very successful with good adoption rates, especially among our core demographics of mothers and retired people,” says Feest, who believes part of this is down to Anglia Co-op achieving its objective of “keeping it simple”.
To this end, the customer simply has to scan their goods and then select to pay by either cash or payment card. There are no options for cash back or for top-ups, which Feest says add complexity. And there is also limited manual intervention from staff over things like the weight of items being outside the accepted tolerance levels.
“I can’t understand why other retailers have so many interventions with customers using self service checkouts. We monitor leakage levels at a detailed level and we see no negative effects at all from our methods,” he says.
