The queues are so long and everyone's trolley is filled to the brim, which makes you wonder if they're buying a week's or a month's stock. The aisles are so crowded that you're sure to knock into someone in a split second of neglect. Children running, housewives jostling to pick the freshest vegetables, meat and seafood, and staff pushing big loads of goods to replenish the stocks before they get wipe out.
Just before it's your turn to make payment at the cashier, and as you are looking through your purchases, you realized that you've forgotten to weigh that cauliflower. What do you do?
It's either you ask the person behind to look after your queue while you fanatically run to the vegetable section to have your item weigh and priced. Or you let the person behind go first. Worst case is to leave the queue and re-queue again.
When I was in Bangkok last week, I had the opportunity to visit Tesco Lotus, a hypermarket chain. Because of the size, the hypermarkets are usually located in the suburb and along highways. You either have to take a taxi or have your personal transport to reach one. You can be traveling on the highway from Bangkok to another city, say Ayutthaya and along the way, you find the hypermarket pop up out of nowhere at what looks like big plot of barren land.
However, there's one such hypermarket which is situated next to the Bangkok BTS Skytrain. So it was relatively easy to reach for me.
The size of the hypermarket is as big as Giant hypermarket in Singapore, maybe slightly larger.
Perhaps because of the size, I noticed that some of the staff were wearing roller-blade. Of course, this speeds things up and makes it less tiring for the staff.
Another thing that I noticed was that there was a staff standing in the middle of the row of cashiers (perhaps about 30 of them) speaking through a microphone.
Of course, I couldn't make out what he was saying. But there were a few other staff around him going to the various cashiers.
Do you know what these people are doing?
They were helping to take the items from the shoppers who have forgotten to weigh and price them and doing it for them before passing them back to the shoppers.
This again speed up the payment as shoppers do not have to run to get their items weigh and priced. The other shoppers are also not held up in the cashier counter.
Being a supermarket for the mass market, there's no way Tesco Lotus can be compared to the shopping experience at Siam Paragon's Gourmet Market.
At Gourmet Market, most of the items are packed nicely, weighed and priced. You will never be in a situation where you have to run to have your item weighed and priced. After all, most of the people who shop there are wealthy and well dressed.
Since Tesco Lotus caters to the mass market, there's really no need to provide the extra service of helping shoppers to weigh and price their items at the cashier, isn't it? Forgotten to weigh and price? Too bad. Just ask them to go weigh and queue up again.
Perhaps the labor cost there is cheap and so they can afford to do this. Maybe they want to prevent the cashier counters from being jammed due to the great number of shoppers. Maybe they want to provide faster service.
Instead, I would take it as their attentiveness towards the comfort of their shoppers. They know that there will be shoppers who will forget to weigh and price their items. They know that it'll be a hassle to make them walk all the way to that particular section in such a huge place. They know that most shoppers there are families with babies and kids, which makes it difficult for them to do so.
What about your business? Do you think about your own interest or your customers' interest?
P.S. I was there on a Thursday and there were no queues at the cashier counters. In fact, there were many counters waiting for shoppers to make payment. So they could have made the shoppers go weigh and price the items themselves instead of helping them.