Retail, The New Now
How to redesign your store to help your customers with social distancing?
So that’s our goal; here’s the tip.
Can you imagine your store organized with this in mind? You must raise customer awareness. Start by taking a tape measure and a brightly coloured marker or duct tape. Follow your current store traffic flow. Marking every 6 feet as you go. Make your aisle width as close to 6 ft as possible. Best to keep traffic flowing in one direction. Use arrows to help communicate this message. This will eliminate areas of overcrowding.
Merchandise your store to deliver products on both sides of the aisles you are now creating. Make sure that someone can get around another customer who is stopped to look at an item or if that’s a problem your customers will have to learn to stay in their zones until it is safe to proceed forward. We don’t want to force someone to hurry! Signs are more important than ever! Or if you need to cover a large area, a recorded message of how to travel through your store and enjoy social distancing is a good idea.
With wider aisle widths, you most likely will have to remove and or move fixtures. Not going to be easy but it’s a must. This most likely will limit the amount and variety of products you can merchandise. Don’t worry. Start merchandising your store with less back up product on the floor. You will have to refresh displays etc more often or encourage customers to buy the products from the samples on the floor and you can arrange curbside pick up at a later date or you will deliver or direct them to your website and you will ship.
Interesting stats: Occupancy limits are a must for companies about to reopen their doors. A good rule of thumb is no more than five customers per 1,000 sq. ft. of total store square footage, including employees.
Retailers should also feature in-store signage at check-out lines that denote six feet of spacing. This will benefit customers and your sales staff alike.
This is also a great opportunity to upgrade POS systems with solutions that can process contact-less and mobile payments during checkout.
We can do this. We are all in this together.
If you have any questions, please let us know. Love to hear from you and how this is working.
Remember Steve and I are here to help you get through COVID-19 and how it has impacted your business? In light of the recent events we have put together a detailed COVID-19 Retail Emergency Strategy Survival Plan. Our survival plan is focused on what you must know and do if you want your Retail Business to survive through these uncertain times. For more information please write or call us to set up an appointment. At this time more than ever you want our winning approach to one-on-one business analysis and strategic emergency planning designed just for you and your business.
Barb & Steve
