Smart Retail, 4th Edition

Appendix I

Reading stores the practical way

I talk a lot in the book about experiencing your stores as customers do and here is a good way to do that. Regularly run this assessment of your own store but also of competitors and non-competitors alike. You’ll uncover loads of ideas and possibilities each time you do. There are three areas to observe:

• the store
• the staff
• the customers.

The store

I’ll bet good money that you already do this when you walk into a shop: you look around. You look at the fixtures, the offers, the dirt on the carpet and you spot the display gaps. You might even see those gaps and suck your teeth a bit and feel relieved that some other manager is under pressure for once.

Start outside the store – over the road, if ...