I live very close to a local grocery store. It is my go-to place for getting all fresh veggies and protein for my daily cooking. The store is huge and has a giant parking lot in front of it. Customers come and go, rendering the store busy almost all the time. The store has two one-way doors, one for entrance only and the other for exit only, connected by a hallway. Customers usually enter through entrance and grab a shopping cart, then check out before they exit through the exit door and ditch their shopping carts right before. A few designated store clerks would rush to get the empty carts to return them back to the “spot” at entrance, to get them ready for new customers.
The flow seems ok, except for when it’s snowing/raining, more customers will take the carts to parking lots, delaying the return of the carts; and when customers leaving too many empty carts after check out counter, clogging the exit hall way. After pushing my way through three empty idle shopping carts before I reach the exit door, I couldn’t help asking myself: “is there a better way to solve this issue?”
I will do a quick mapping tomorrow to test a few of my hypothesis. The premises is that the store cannot remove shopping carts because the customers need them to be present throughout the whole shopping experience. How can we improve this experience?
Update: Finally I’ve got time to complete my flow sketch with Axure, which is a fancy and easy-to-use software!
Journey of a Customer:
Journey of Shopping Carts:
Analysis and my suggestion:
I didn’t actually do any research with the market employees, but the man power and time needed for each type of cart returning was based on my day-to-day observation at the market. If you compare the two flow charts, you can see that only one type of carts are blocking the part between register counter and exit, and returning those carts actually takes the least man power and time. If the market can station one employee for this task, they can guarantee the free flow of the register counter-exit area at the busiest hour.