Get Them OUT the Door

Bill McCurry

“They don’t want to be in our stores. We know what the customer wants and they want to get out of the store.” In 2012, Howard Stoeckel, then the Wawa CEO, was justifying to an interviewer why he’d spent millions in new technology to shave a fraction of a second off the speed of each transaction. “It may not seem like much to you, but to our customers getting on their way is very important. We owe it to them to make it as fast and efficient as possible.”

Listen to Howard! If you’re one of the 80% of Americans who don’t live near a Wawa, let me enlighten you. Wawa doesn’t have customers; they have cult members. They’re a “private” company, although the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) owns close to 40% of the company’s stock. They don’t like sharing financial data so we’ll skip specifics.

Wawa started 50 years ago as a dairy-and-convenience store. Today, in most of their almost 600 locations, they’re more of a Deli-Hot Foods-To Go with gas pumps. They’ve added their own bakery to ensure fresh products. It’s generally accepted that Wawa serves more coffee in the Philadelphia area than Starbucks, ranking in the Top 10 coffee resellers in the United States, although they’re only in six Eastern states. They’re the third largest food retailer in Greater Philadelphia.

They’ve invested heavily in technology. Wawa offers customers self-serve computer touch screens in the deli. They say you can order more than a million sandwich combinations at the kiosk. If the order’s wrong, it’s likely the customer’s fault. No problem! They’ll happily remake it. With the addition of this technology, Wawa saved the labor of taking deli orders, gave the customers “ownership” of their orders by providing almost unlimited options and sped up the through-put time so customers could control their store visit without waiting for a perceived slow clerk or indecisive customer to move the line forward. While there’s no official statement, my guess is the average order size increases as customers add on things they might not have wanted if they were pressured to hurry up and give their order to a live person.

Wawa’s main competition for coffee is either Starbucks at the top end or Dunkin Donuts at the lower end, along with the ubiquitous McDonald’s. Wawa goes a different direction. They provide coffee with dozens of variables—flavors, additives, sweeteners—all on a self-serve basis. The coffee is always hot, supplies are plentiful and dozens of people could be getting coffee at the same time in the busier stores.

So what does a coffee, hoagie and gas business have to do with garden centers? Plenty. As you plan for next spring, you’re probably more concerned with getting customers IN the door instead of OUT of it. Will you admit that in the spring your customers have to wait in long lines to check out? You believe the customer will understand it’s your busy weekend and wait patiently. That reasoning isn’t valid today. Customers don’t care about your problems. They’re in a hurry. You’ll alienate more customers with delays on your busy spring weekend than you may see the entire month of August.

Learn from Wawa. Where can you invest in technology to speed up checkout? Perhaps additional registers or more credit card terminals and access points for card authorizations. Maybe a couple of mobile credit card processing stations at the extra tills will help reduce the crush on the main processing capabilities. How about arming your staff with those mobile card readers so a customer can “impulse purchase” anywhere without standing on line? Why not donate to the Boy Scouts’ summer camp fund in exchange for scouts helping carry out customer purchases? It’s good PR and keeps qualified staff doing what they should be doing—selling to customers. GP

Charge your batteries with a different perspective.
Bill will be speaking at the Green Industry Show in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on November 12, 13 and 14. Hear what’s new for next year and make 2015 your best year ever. Visit www.greenindustryshow.com.

Bill would love to hear from you with questions, comments or ideas for future columns. Please contact him
at wmccurry@mccurryassoc.com or (609) 688-1169.