01.04.2006

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

For more Hartman Group articles on SHOPPER INSIGHTS, click here...

08.11.2005 "Extending Shopper Insights: Understanding Cultural Dynamics"

02.10.2005 "Packaged vs. Fresh...and Center Store Migration"

02.03.2005 "What Is 'Home Experience'?"

01.06.2005 "5 Myths in Consumer Shopping Behavior"

10.14.2004 "8 Common Blunders in Consumer Insights"

03.15.2004 "Luxury Consumption"- Part I

12.27.2002 "Re-Thinking Our Traditional Notion of the Mass Marketplace: The Emergence of a New Paradigm"

06.28.2002 "Experience, Expectation & the Shopping Trip"


For more Hartman Group articles on CONVENIENCE, click here...

05.19.2005 "The Myth of One-Stop Shopping"

03.24.2005 "Convenient...and Fresh?"

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Drive-thru Grocery: when Is It Really Relevant?

AutoCart, a "drive-through super center" concept plans to sell convenience...from the seat of your car. A key idea behind the soon-to-break-ground facility is saving consumers time and effort by condensing multiple errands into one quick and easy trip. AutoCart is poised to offer many categories of goods and services - groceries, banking, DVD rental, pharmacy and dry cleaning among them - in an effort to make it a one-stop shopping occasion. Loads of goods are to be delivered to in-car customers within minutes after they pull in to an approximately 130,000 square-foot AutoCart location, the first of which is scheduled to open this spring in Las Cruces, NM.

While AutoCart sounds like a great idea, because it has an inherent appeal to a technology and convenience-loving American culture, we're somewhat skeptical of how well its approach matches up with how people actually shop. AutoCart seems like a shrine built around a nifty supply-chain technology, rather than a targeted application of that nifty supply-chain technology where and when it is most relevant. ...Which leads us to ask:

1. When is drive-thru relevant to today's shoppers?
   
   
2. On which cultural occasions for shopping is it likely to fulfill an unmet need to avoid going into a store altogether?

AutoCart has a real appeal, but only to consumers on cultural occasions for shopping in which acquiring staple goods for the home, whatever the category, is the main task to be accomplished. These could be either repetitive, "no-brainer" commodity type purchases, or items that one "specs out" prior to arrival in a retail space, be it physical or on the Internet. Appropriate product categories for "no-brainer" purchases - at least for mainstream consumers - include routine dairy (the gallon of store brand milk that is purchased weekly, for instance) and many center-store, packaged grocery items that are purchased repetitively for stocking the home pantry, that don't require physical and sensory inspection prior to purchase.

Then there are categories of grocery where this doesn't apply. For example, most of us want to put our hands on produce before we buy it. And in prepared foods and bakery sections of grocery stores, we all use aroma, touch and/or appearance to assess the freshness of products. The only sensory experience consumers will have at an AutoCart is sitting in their cars smellling exhaust fumes.

Ultimately, we don't expect AutoCart to do well with any non-commodity goods that rely on retail experience to push sales. This makes drive-thru shopping relevant when the in-store experience doesn't really matter to shoppers. As detailed in Shopper Insights: How Cultural Occasions Frame the Customer Experience, there are a few cultural occasions for shopping when this holds true for some consumers, specifically, those lacking substantial health and wellness or foodie orientations: Random Emergency and Traditional Weekly. We focus on the latter below:

Traditional Weekly shopping occasions are characterized in many ways by what they are not. That is, they are not occasions for exploration, discovery, learning about new products, or much meaningful personal interaction within a retail space. They are time-constrained, cursory, obligatory, and have little emotional content, save the urge to get a good bargain. It is drudgery for consumers who perform it regularly, often augmented by the truly underwhelming stores selected by these consumers on these bargain-hunting occasions. Ask your average mother of teenagers how much she enjoys her weekly grocery shopping trip and you'll understand what we mean. These are the types of household provisioning purchases that many (especially those with kids) view as nothing more than a chore, and where any steps toward making those purchases more expedient would be appreciated. On this level, AutoCart seems to have some serious appeal.

Yet, Traditional Weekly shopping occasions often involves multiple channels because it is rather bargain oriented. Why squander money on everyday staple foods, consumers tend to ask themselves? If a consumer doesn't find a bargain on one of the brands of toilet paper that go over well in her house at Costco, she'll check at Wal-Mart or Safeway when she happens by those stores. AutoCart, instead of being one-stop, will be a one-among-many stops. AutoCart might become something like the grocery area at Wal-Mart, where people opportunistically seek bargains on whatever packaged goods are there at the moment, and then go elsewhere to round out their grocery purchases. Assuming everything works as planned, AutoCart would be a significantly quicker in-and-out experience, and perhaps could take some sales from Wal-Mart.

Oh and by the way, 'drive-thru' means fast...um...real fast!

Avoiding any impression of delay or inconvenience will be absolutely critical for drive thru stores like AutoCart. Consumers' perceptions of time change depending on shopping context. Twelve minutes can be a long time to wait in a car in a drive-thru line. Do you remember the last time you got fast food at a drive-thru? Time inches by slowly in such situations. Sitting in your car, you are thinking about those other places you still need to go. That won't change at AutoCart, you'll still need to visit other retailers (as we've outlined above). At least at the grocery store you are actively walk around, not passively waiting. At least until you get to the checkout line.

Having no intrinsic appeal as a shopping experience, AutoCart's technical performance becomes the sole consumer focus of evaluation. There is little to distract a customer in a situation such as a stockout (when what they want is out of stock). At Target, for example, when there is a stockout, the shopper may be mildly disappointed, as they continue to look around for other items, since Target is a "fun" store full of new and interesting things to discover. Not so at a place like AutoCart, as far as we understand it. AutoCart will need to get orders right, every time, and do it very quickly. Much more quickly than 12 minutes.

Conclusions

While we're certain that the brains behind AutoCart have done their research, we also believe that they still may not understand how and why consumers shop. We do see some future for such a store concept, but it should be narrowed and focused, toward matching consumer orientations on specific shopping occasions. In particular, the opportunity to help ease the stress of shoppers on Traditional Weekly shopping occasions by presenting a more convenient and expedient option is compelling. And if AutoCart is able to compete effectively on price, it may be able to do very well in fulfilling certain needs of many mainstream shoppers.

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