Is your shopping experience really as simple as to Pick'nPay?
Pick'nPay is the second largest supermarket chain store in South Africa. On a sunny Wednesday that was the 3rd of October 2018, we visited the vibrant Pick’nPay supermarket in Braamfontein close to the Wits University campus to learn what the store’s microgeography is by observing the general setup of the supermarket, what has been placed where, their commercial methods and tactics to encourage the clients to buy most things as possible, and the behaviours and demographics of the shoppers while in the store. Finally we tried to determine whether customer behaviour was in response to the way in which things have been arranged in the supermarket.
Methods and results
First we went about observing and trying to determine the layout of the supermarket from the entrance point, through the aisles to the furthest point of the store and we drew all that we observed and then came up with the basic layout in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1. Layout for the Braamfontein Pick’nPay Supermarket
We then went about observing the behaviours and demographics of customers within the store on a section basis where we spent five minutes in one section of the store observing the behaviours of people, whether they were reading labels, simply passing through or removing items from the shelves. We arrived at the supermarket at 11:30 in the morning and between the two of us spending five minutes in sections of the supermarket we spent 50 minutes observing and tallying the number of customers that entered an aisle, their age group, their gender and general behaviours. We placed people into two broad age groups of young and adult; young being 30 years old and less and adult being 31 and above. Age grouping was according to the observer’s assessment of appearance only. Figures 2, 3 and 4 illustrate the results of our observations in each section of the supermarket. The number of people observed for each section was converted into a proportion of the overall number of people from every section (Figure 2) this was also done for men and for women individually (Figure 3).
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| Figure 2 Percentage of people in each section of the Pick’nPay |
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| Figure 3. Comparing the proportions of men and women in each section of the supermarket |
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| Figure 4. The demographic proportions for gender and age |
During the second part of our observations, we decided to employ one of Paco Underhill’s methods of tracking a customer and observing their behaviours while shopping (Figure 5). We went at the entrance of the supermarket, waited for someone to come and then followed that person during her shopping. The person that we followed was a adult woman, approximately 50 years old. Her first stop was to the spices (“condiments, on the layout). She spent about 2 minutes to look all of them and at the end chose ginger. Then she went directly to the aisle 3, where she spent around 3-4 minutes. She looked carefully the soaps, but did not buy anything. Finally, she went to the last aisle, but she had a stop at the packaged meat during 1 or 2 minutes, without buying it. Thereafter, she spent 5 minutes to look at the butter, and finally bought one of them. Finally, she went to pay.
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Here is Emma, tracking an adult women
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To conclude, the woman we followed spent approximately 10-12 minutes in the shop. She didn't buy everything she looked at. On the contrary, she spent more time looking things without buy them than the reverse. Judging by the time she spent for each article she bought, we can presume that she was comparing the brands and the prices. Her behaviour shows that she stayed aware while shopping, about the differences of price for example. Plus, as she did not buy everythings she looked at, it can mean that she resisted to the supermarket’s tactics to make people buy the most as possible. However, we can notice that she followed the direction of the shop. Maybe that explain why she did not buy anything in the green point on figure 6. Indeed, even if she already knew that she just wanted ginger and butter, she had to go through all the shop to get them, because the butter is with the dairy products at the end of the shop.
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| Figure 6. The path of tracked customer followed the intended flow according to the layout of the supermarket. The red circles represent where she decided to make a purchase and the green circles represent where she spend a significant amount of time, but did not make a purchase. |
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| Figure 7. Here are the products that the woman bought. The items that she purchased were generally those that are placed at eye level on the shelves |
Some interesting observations to conclude
While we were in the shop, we tried to notice some schemes established by Pick’nPay to increase their sales. We are going to explain the interesting things we noticed. The first one is that they dispose peanut butter just next to the bread, although there is a “special” place for the sales of peanut butter in the bread section. We can suppose that the aim is to make people want to eat peanut butter with their bread. It seems to work because all of the pots were sold.
Another observation is that you can chose cold drinks next the convenient food (food to take away). Situated just at the entrance of the supermarket, many people were queuing. It looked clearly like an incentive to buy something to drink with the food you just get. Plus, we saw another place where people could buy cold drink, just between the dairy aisle and the tills. It can be surprising because there already is a place dedicated to cold drinks, next to the frozen food as we can see on the layout. Thus, the supermarket uses as much spaces as it can to set up things to sell. There was also a designated till in the convenient food section which allowed for even more ‘convenience’ for patrons as they are able to get their fast food and drink and leave the supermarket from that point without having to walk back around to the main tills.
We also noticed that in store brands were generally placed at eye level on the shelves and it was interesting to find out that there was a range of prices for the goods on display on each shelf and goods were not placed on different levels on the shelves according to the prices of the products, where higher priced items are placed on the upper shelves and the lower priced items are placed on lower shelves, (which would help the consumer, as they could avoid being distracted by all the other products and simply look down if they were after something very specific) as is done in supermarkets in France. It suggests that there is a reason why particular products are placed on particular positions on shelves which is much like the peanut butter being placed among the sliced bread where the sale of one item contributes to or influences the sale of the other.
Paco Underhill
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