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Welcome
to the new Views! These essays are intended to be a
continuation of Bob Steven's work with his Views from
the Hills of Kentucky, derived from Bob's forty years of
research at Procter & Gamble. His natural curiosity
led him to researching real shoppers in real stores in
the early 1970's and there he formulated the important
concept of "assessment in context." Although I began
interviewing shoppers in-store about the same time, I
did so only because of access to convenient and high
quality respondents. In his retirement, Bob taught me
that there was so much more significance to in-store
research. Hopefully you will recognize my essays here as
a continuation of Bob's work, now that he has passed to
his well deserved rest. Your comments and suggestions
are welcome.
-Herb Sorensen, Ph.D., Global
Scientific Director, TNS Retail & Shopper Insights
The Aisleness of Stores
October 31, 2008
- by Herb Sorensen,
Ph.D., Global Scientific Director, TNS Retail and
Shopper Insights
E-Mail: herb.sorensen@tns-sorensen.com
Every store in the world has a very important
property we refer to as "aisleness." Think of it this
way: If you begin with an empty building and begin
putting merchandise in it, with a small amount of
merchandise in relation to the available space, you will
probably scatter the merchandise widely. As you increase
the amount of merchandise, you will necessarily begin to
reduce the amount of open space available to shoppers,
dedicating more and more of the store space to products.
Eventually you will have so much merchandise in
the store that you will have to begin packing it
together tightly, resulting in aisles! As you pack more
and more products into the store, the store will have an
increasing degree of "aisleness." We can calculate a
reasonable measure of aisleness by simply dividing the
area (square feet or meters) allocated to products by
the area allocated to people.
Shoppers respond to
increasing aisleness by increasing the amount of time it
takes them to spend a dollar.
First we should note that
it is a bit surprising that a single variable like
aisleness should have such a large correlation with the
efficiency of shopping (seconds per dollar.) Retailers
often take a cavalier attitude toward shoppers time,
willingly squandering it in hopes of making additional
sales. But the efficiency with which shoppers spend
money is exactly the same as the efficiency with which
the retailer sells. In fact, aisleness may account for
the widespread suppression of up to 80% of potential
sales in supermarkets.
To understand the vital
role of time in the shopping world, you may want to
review our white paper on The
Three Shopping Currencies. We will discuss another
of those currencies, angst, in another issue of the new
Views.
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