Self-scan stress in Sainsbury’s. And why don’t UK supermarkets use electronic shelf labels?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Almost every Thursday morning, before I start work, I visit the town market to buy food. After that, I do the weekly supermarket shop. Most people can understand me shopping locally and supporting the market. The question I’m sometimes asked is why I don’t do the supermarket shop online? It’s partly because I’ve learned that the store is well-stocked on a Thursday morning and I can do the weekly shop in 20-30 minutes. There’s also an element of dissatisfaction with previous online supermarket shopping experiences.

I mostly shop at Sainsbury’s. There are some items that we get from Lidl in the next town (though there’s an Aldi locally now, so that may change) and I have to go to Tesco or Waitrose for some other items because the local Sainsbury’s is too small. I also use Costco. Basically, I know what I can get where, at what price/quality.

“SmartShop”

In Sainsbury’s, I use the SmartShop self-scanning technology. According to the Sainsbury’s website:

“SmartShop is the new way to shop at Sainsbury’s. Just scan, bag and go, it couldn’t be easier!”

I started to use this a few years ago, when Sainsbury’s ran a campaign to encourage its use. Then, just a few weeks ago, some tills were removed in our local store to enlarge the self-checkout area. I’ve also switched from using the app on my phone to an in-store handset as I found the barcode scanning to be more efficient.

Random checks

A few months ago, almost every shop was being selected for a “random” check. Sainsbury’s explains that:

“Sometimes customers can double scan an item by mistake, or an item might end up in your trolley that hasn’t been scanned properly. So from time to time we might ask you to have your shopping re-scanned by one of our colleagues.

These rescans are random and they’ll only happen at checkout.”

These were annoying (as it was a regular occurrence), but understandable, until one time the entire shop had to be re-scanned. One of the advantages of self-scanning is that you can carefully place your items in bags so they are not damaged. I watched as my items were re-scanned and roughly repacked for me. I took a deep breath and walked away.

I understand why stores do this. Shoplifting is a huge issue nationally, thought more of a problem in some stores than others. But this policy on self-scans is effectively saying “we think you might be stealing from us”. There’s no apology when no theft is found.

There is an argument that self-scan is also a cost saving measure for supermarkets. That needs to be weighed up against the shrinkage and the customer experience. Some stores simply won’t install self-scan in certain areas, because of the risk.

The “random” checks stopped for a while but today, I was selected again. It’s fair to say that I did not respond well. In fact, I was enraged. 12 September is not a great day for me (it would have been my late Father’s birthday) but I honestly don’t know if that was a factor in my anger when a full re-scan was required. I insisted on speaking to a manager – I don’t believe the scans are random and I’m sure there’s some pattern recognition on my shopping habits via my Nectar card. The last couple of weeks’ shopping was small (with one teenager away from home). This week I spent more, including alcohol, and it felt like I was being singled out.

Pricing errors

The irony is that, after the store re-scanned all my shopping, I found mistakes in their pricing! Far from me adding to Sainsbury’s shrinkage bill, they were not passing on advertised savings to customers.

Readers will probably be familiar with the concept of discounts for loyalty card holders. Tesco has Clubcard, Sainsbury’s has Nectar, other retailers have their own schemes too. These are controversial for some, but I’m comfortable accepting that I trade my data for cash. After all, I give data about my habits away all the time on the Internet, using “free” services (if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product).

I found that Sainsbury’s had not passed on a Nectar discount on one of my items. Furthermore, because the ePOS system was not configured with the correct price, it would presumably have been overcharging every customer who bought that item and used their Nectar card.

Then, later in the day, I spotted that some of the personalised Nectar offers from a SmartShop scan were not passed to me when I’d had the full shop scanned through a normal till. Those offers were actually a reason for me to buy multiple items, rather than just one. They had increased the volume of the sale, but I’d ended up paying the full price.

Both of these mistakes were corrected by staff but they shouldn’t have happened.

In summary, when Sainsbury’s systems suspected I might have been shoplifting, it actually turned out that they owed me money.

Teenage kicks

I started my working life in retail. As a teenager, I worked for Bejam (now Iceland), and then a few years at Safeway. It was mostly stacking shelves but also warehouse work and checkouts when the store was busy. I saw the change from manual pricing to ePOS with barcodes, and I worked on a number of store openings and refits. After I decided to go to Polytechnic instead of joining Safeway’s management programme, I came back in my holidays and worked night shifts. That period of my life taught me quite a lot about supermarket retail and, fundamentally, not much has changed since. Of course, there have been some developments – like just-in-time deliveries replacing in-store warehouse space and the creation of digital services such as online shopping and self-scan.

One thing that does seem to have changed though is the checks on price labels. At Safeway in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was a full-time job to check every price in store and manage changes/promotions. If the shelf edge labels didn’t match the computer then the customers were charged the wrong price. That was taken seriously back then.

This attention to detail seems to be gone. I imagine it was a cost-cutting efficiency (as is self-service). Nowadays, I regularly spot pricing errors in Sainsbury’s and it usually leads to store staff removing errant shelf edge tags. And Sainsbury’s are not alone – the local Co-op and OneStop stores seem to have similar issues.

Electronic shelf labelling

So, why don’t UK supermarkets use electronic shelf labels (ESLs), like those seen in continental Europe? I did some basic analysis and it seems that early trials were inconclusive, with concerns around cost, technology and operational challenges. So, just like any IT system really.

On the other hand, the benefits include efficiency, dynamic pricing, customer information and sustainability. The Grocer reported in 2021 that ESLs were making a comeback but I’ve not seen much evidence to suggest it’s happening quickly.

So what might ESLs cost for a store like the one where I shop, which was only built 5 years ago?

My local Sainsbury’s store cost £3.3m to build and is 1610 square metres in size. A few prompts to an AI assistant has told me that:

  • A store this size can be expected to stock 20-25,000 product lines.
  • The cost of ESLs can vary depending on the brand and features but an investment for 10,000 lines would be around £50-80,000.

So, about £125-200,000 for a store this size (between 3.7 and 6% of the £3.3m budget) to have accurate pricing in store.

No business case?

The thing is, that, in addition to my teenage shelf-stacking, I have some IT experience of working in retail. When I was at Polo Ralph Lauren in the early 2000s it was a lot easier to justify application spend than infrastructure. If IT spend doesn’t add to the bottom line, then the business case is unlikely to be approved. And if stores make more money from advertising offers that are not applied, why would they invest in a system to display accurate pricing?

Call me a cynic, but could that be the real reason why UK stores haven’t invested in electronic ticketing?

Featured image: author’s own.

Weeknote 1/2024: A new beginning

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Wow, that was a bump. New Year celebrations over, a day off for the public holiday, and straight back to work.

After a lot of uncertainty in December, I’ve been keen to get stuck in to something valuable, and I’m not breaking any confidentiality by saying that my focus right now is on refreshing the collateral behind Node4’s Public Cloud offerings. I need to work across the business – my Office of the CTO (OCTO) role is about strategy, innovation and offering development – but the work also needs to include specialist sales colleagues, our marketing teams, and of course the experts that actually deliver the engagements.

So that’s the day job. Alongside that, I’ve been:

  • Avoiding stating any grand new year resolutions. I’ll only break them. It was literally hours before I broke my goal of not posting on Twitter/X this year. Though I did step away from a 453-day streak on Duolingo to focus my spare time on other, hopefully less gamified, pursuits:
  • Doing far too little exercise. A recurring health condition is impacting my ability to walk, run, cycle and to get back to Caveman Conditioning. It’s getting a bit better but it may be another week before I can have my new year fitness kick-start.
  • Eating badly. Logging everything in the Zoe app is helping me to see what I should avoid (spoiler: I need to eat more plants and less sweet stuff) but my willpower is still shockingly bad. I was also alarmed to see Prof. Tim Spector launching what appeared to be an ultra-processed food (UPF) product. More on that after I’ve got to M&S and actually seen the ingredients list for the Zoe Gut Shot, but others are telling me it’s not a UPF.
  • Redesigning the disaster recovery strategy for my photos. I learned the hard way several years ago that RAID is not a backup, and nothing exists unless it’s in three places. For me that’s the original, a copy on my Synology NAS, and copy in the cloud. My cloud (Azure) backups were in a proprietary format from the Synology Hyper Backup program, so I’ve started to synchronise the native files by following a very useful article from Charbel Nemnom, MVP. Unfortunately the timestamps get re-written on synchronisation, but the metadata is still inside the files and these are the disaster copies – hopefully I’ll never need to rely on them.
  • Watching the third season of Slow Horses. No spoilers please. I still have 4 episodes to watch… but it’s great TV.
  • Watching Mr Bates vs. The Post Office. The more I learn about the Post Office Scandal, the more I’m genuinely shocked. I worked for Fujitsu (and, previously, ICL) for just over 15 years. I was nothing to do with Horizon, and knew nothing of the scandal, but it’s really made me think about the values of the company where I spent around half my career to date.
  • Spreading some of my late Father-in-law’s ashes by his tree in the Olney Community Orchard.
  • Meeting up with old friends from my “youth”, as one returns to England from his home in California, for a Christmas visit.

Other things

Other things I found noteworthy this week:

  • Which came first, the chicken or the egg scissors or the blister-pack?

Press coverage

This week, I was quoted in this article:

Coming up

This weekend will see:

  • A return to Team MK Youth Cycle Coaching. Our local cyclo-cross league is finished for the 2023/4 season so we’re switching back to road cycling as we move into the new year.
  • Some home IT projects (more on them next week).
  • General adulting and administration.

Next week, I’ll be continuing the work I mentioned at the head of this post, but also joining an online Group Coaching session from Professor John Amaechi OBE. I have no idea what to expect but I’m a huge fan of his wise commentary. I’m also listening to The Promises of Giants on Audible. (I was reading on Kindle, but switched to the audiobook.)

This week in photos

Featured image: Author’s own
(this week’s flooding of the River Great Ouse at Olney)

Weeknote 17/2021: Not yet digitally transformed

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 4 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This week I’ve been struggling to focus but still moved a few things forwards. I also kept bumping up against some bizarre (non) efforts at “digital transformation”, courtesy of Standard Life (abrdn), Costco and the UK Government.

This week’s highlights included:

  • Realising that digital transformation hasn’t reached Costco UK yet – and no membership card means no entry and no shopping:

Looking ahead to the (long) weekend, I have no races to take the eldest teenager to and the weather ins’t looking wonderful. So, just the usual Youth Cycle Coaching on Saturday and, hopefully, some relaxing and pottering at “geek stuff” in the Man Cave…

This week in photos

No Insta’ from me yet this week (maybe there will be over the long weekend) so here’s a Line of Duty meme instead:

Shop local when buying a new bike

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Back in 2013, I bought myself a road bike. It’s a Bianchi Via Nirone 7 C2C and it was the first road bike I’d had since my teenage years when I had a 21-speed “racer” (complete with shifters on the down tube).

My Bianchi has served me well but, after nearly 12000km I’m starting to notice some hairline cracks in the paint, a bit of corrosion on the chainstay – and I recently had to cut out one of the upgrades I’d made as the carbon fibre seat post had bonded itself to the inside of the aluminium alloy seat tube.

I’d been saving up for a new bike for a while (promising myself that I could have a new bike when I lost some weight…) but I decided to retire the Bianchi (or at least just use it for Zwifting) and get something new (maybe I can lose some weight by riding more now I have the new bike).

For a long while, I was tempted by a Canyon Endurace CF SL Disc 8.0 Di2. Canyon make some lovely bikes but they are mail-order only (unless you can visit them in Germany). Not having distributors reduces the price, but it also increases the risk of buying the wrong size, etc. added to which, recent experience (buying a frame from Planet X for my son) showed me that sometimes you get what you pay for.

I also feel guilty every time I shop at Wiggle – we’ll miss our local bike shops (LBS) when they are gone and I’ve relied on a few for parts at short notice recently (including Corley Cycles and Chaineys in Milton Keynes). But, just like buying from Amazon instead of a high street store, sometimes the economics mean it just makes sense. Even so, with a new bike purchase, I wasn’t entirely comfortable buying online.

I looked at some of the other mainstream brands too (how about a Trek Domane?). But what about the price difference?

Well, there were a few things to take into account there:

  • Online sizing tools are good, but not perfect and the Canyon would need a bike fit before I could be sure I was ordering the right size. Corley Cycles included not only the sizing fit but also an advanced bike fit with the new bike.
  • Then, membership of my local cycling club got me a further discount (10%).
  • At this point, we’re getting close to pretty much the same price.
  • Chuck in some bottles, cages, and a lot of advice – plus I’m helping to keep my LBS in business and I decided that I’d rather have the “purchase from a shop” experience.

So, I’m now the proud owner of the new Specialized Roubaix Comp (2020 edition). Sure, the lightweight endurance bike with electronic shifting became a lightweight endurance bike with mechanical shifting and front suspension instead but my conscience is clear – and it is pretty damned awesome.

Poorly-targeted InMail on LinkedIn…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A good chunk of the email I receive is either:

  1. Spam from SEO specialists who can’t even present a well-written email (so why would I let them loose on my website?).
  2. Spam from people who want to advertise on my website or write content to link to their client’s dubious sites (no thanks).
  3. LinkedIn requests from recruiters I’ve never even spoken to (read on).

Now, let me be clear, there are some good recruiters out there: people who build rapport and work on relationships with people. Maybe one day we’ll work together, maybe we won’t but when I hear my peers talking about recruiters that I know, then I know they are well-connected within our industry and they will be my first port of call if I find myself looking for work (or to recruit).

Then there’s stuff like this, a real email, received tonight via LinkedIn’s InMail feature. I’ve changed the names to protect the guilty but apart from that, it’s a facsimile:

“Hi Mark,

[Do I know you?]

A leading global provider of retail software solutions is seeking an experienced EPOS Architect to join the European Portfolio team in a key leadership role at the heart of a massive digital transformation programme.

[Doesn’t appear to be very well researched: I’m an Enterprise Architect, not an EPOS Architect… I know very little about EPOS systems. Sure, maybe EPOS might be part of something I do put together but I’m no EPOS specialist. Well, it starts with E and ends with Architect – so it must be related! Does this recruiter even know what they are recruiting for?]

You’ll be working closely with the technical leadership of tier 1 global retailers such as huge retailer name removed, and leading national retailers across Europe to shape and deliver next generation cloud and on premise point of sale systems.

[Minor point but it’s “on-premises”, FFS. It’s a place, not an idea.]

An excellent package of £75,000 – £100,000 + car + bonus is on offer, plus extensive European travel to the headquarters of the continent’s leading businesses.

[Since when was “extensive European travel to the headquarters of the continent’s leading businesses” a perk? This is the sort of benefit dreamed up by people who never leave their office. What it generally means is “spend lots of time away from home travelling economy class to a business park but never really see the city you’re going to…”]

Further details: website/Job/Detail/epos-solution-architect-leeds-en-GB

[So it’s in Leeds. Leeds is 3 hours from where I live]

For a fully confidential discussion, contact someone.i.dont-know@recruiter.co.uk

 

Someone Else
Senior Recruitment Consultant @ leading global specialist recruitment group | Specialising in Testing across Yorkshire | someone.else@recruiter.com

[Why am I getting email on a Friday evening from one person I don’t know to ask me to contact someone else I don’t know? Mind you, if their specialism is “Testing across Yorkshire”, maybe that explains the poor targetting of this role to a guy 150 miles away in Milton Keynes…]”

Luckily, I’m not looking for work (or to hire anyone) at the moment but, when I am, this agency will not be on my list… sadly, this is not an isolated incident.

Weeknote 5: Playing with Azure; Black Friday; substandard online deliveries; and the usual tech/cycling/family mix (Week 47, 2017)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This weeknote is a bit of a rush-job – mostly because it’s Sunday afternoon and I’m writing this at the side of a public swimming pool whilst supervising a pool party… it will be late tonight when I get to finish it!

The week

There not a huge amount to say about this week though. It’s been as manic as usual, with a mixture of paid consulting days, pre-sales and time at Microsoft.

The time at Microsoft was excellent though – I spent Tuesday in their London offices, when Daniel Baker (@AzureDan) gave an excellent run through of some of the capabilities in Azure. I like to think I have a reasonable amount of Azure experience and I was really looking to top up my knowledge with recent developments as well as to learn a bit more about using some of the advanced workloads but I learned a lot that day. I think Dan is planning some more videos so watch his Twitter feed but his “Build a Company in a Day” slides are available for download.

On the topic of Azure, I managed to get the sentiment analysis demo I’ve been working on based on a conversation with my colleague Matt Bradley (@MattOnMicrosoft) and Daniel Baker also touched on it in his Build a Company in a Day workshop. It uses an Azure Logic App to:

  1. Monitor Twitter on a given topic;
  2. Detect sentiment with Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics;
  3. Push data into Power BI dataset for visualisation;
  4. Send an email if the sentiment is below a certain value.

It’s a bit rough-and-ready (my Power BI skills are best described as “nascent”) but it’s not a bad demo – and it costs me pennies to run. You can also do something similar with Microsoft Flow instead of an Azure Logic App.

Black Friday

I hate Black Friday. Just an excuse to shift some excess stock onto greedy consumers ahead of Christmas…

…but it didn’t stop me buying things:

  • An Amazon Fire TV Stick to make our TV smart again (it has fewer and fewer apps available because it’s more than 3 years old…). Primarily I was after YouTube but my youngest is very excited about the Manchester City app!
  • Another set of Bluetooth speakers (because the kids keep “borrowing” my Bose Soundlink Mini 2).
  • Some Amazon buttons at a knock-down £1.99 (instead of £4.99) for IoT hacking.
  • A limited edition GCN cycle jersey that can come back to me from my family as a Christmas present!

The weekend

My weekend involved: cycling (my son was racing cyclocross again in the Central CX League); an evening out with my wife (disappointing restaurant in the next town followed by great gin in our local pub); a small hangover; some Zwift (to blow away the cobwebs – and although it was sunny outside, the chances of hitting black ice made the idea of a real road bike ride a bit risky); the pool party I mentioned earlier (belated 13th birthday celebrations for my eldest); 7 adolescent kids eating an enormous quantity of food back at ours; and… relax.

Other stuff

My eldest son discovered that the pressure washer can make bicycle bar tape white again! (I wrote a few years back about using baby wipes to clean bar tape but cyclocross mud goes way beyond even their magical properties.)

After posting my 7 days 7 photos efforts last week, I saw this:

I’ll get my coat.

I also learned a new term: “bikeshedding” (nothing to do with cycling… or smoking… or other teenage activities…):

It’s scary to see how much we’re cluttering space – not just our planet:

There’s a new DNS service in town:

I’ve switched the home connection from OpenDNS (now owned by Cisco) to 9.9.9.9 and will report back in a while…

This ad tells a great story:

Curve is now available to ordinary employees and not just business-people!

We recently switched back to Tesco for our online grocery shopping (we left years ago because it seemed someone was taking one or two items from every order, hoping we wouldn’t notice). Well, it seems things have improved in some ways, but not in others…

On the subject of less-than-wonderful online shopping experiences, after I criticised John Lewis for limiting website functionality instead of bursting to the cloud:

It seems they got their own back by shipping my wife’s Christmas present with Hermes, who dumped it on the front doorstep (outside the notified delivery timeframe) and left a card to say it had been delivered to a secure location:

It may be silly but this made me laugh:

Finally, for this week, I borrowed my son’s wireless charger to top up my iPhone. Charging devices without cables – it’s witchcraft, I tell you! Witchcraft!

Next week, I’ll be back with my customer in Rochdale, consulting on what risual calls the “Optimised Service Vision” so it was interesting to see Matt Ballantine’s slides on Bringing Service Design to IT Service. I haven’t seen Matt present these but it looks like our thinking is quite closely aligned…

That’s all folks!

That’s all for this week. I’m off to watch some more Halt and Catch Fire before I get some sleep in preparation for what looks like a busy week…

An open letter to John Lewis (and other retailers who charge for Click and Collect)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 8 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

As the retail sector has adapted to meet the demands of Internet-based commerce, many retailers have found home delivery to be expensive and unprofitable. Free delivery may close the deal but what does it actually cost the retailer to ship to personal addresses? Probably far more than that £3-5 P&P charge…

New Delivery Models for the age of Internet commerce

To address this, many traditional retailers have integrated with their existing operations to provide “Click and Collect” services whereby customer deliveries are sent to a nominated store. Sometimes this is done well. Other times the divide between the online business and the brick and mortar stores is painfully obvious – particularly when handling returns.

Meanwhile, Internet-only retailers have created pick-up points (e.g. Amazon), partnered with retailers (e.g. eBay and Argos/Sainsburys), or developed premium services (e.g. Amazon Prime) to subsidise delivery. Others (like Doddle) have created a business model around providing somewhere to have parcels delivered for collection on the way home from work.

Charging for Click and Collect?

Whilst charging for delivery is commonplace (perhaps with free delivery over a certain threshold), one major UK retailer (John Lewis) charges for Click and Collect under a threshold value of £30. Their systems have the business intelligence to email me after failing to complete a transaction but sadly not the intelligence to understand why that might be (a £29.90 order that attracts a £2 click and collect charge, when a £30 order would be free).

This was my response, by email – and now here in public:

“Dear Sir or Madam,
Earlier today, I received the email below, based on a transaction that was not completed. I would complete my order, if it wasn’t for your policy on Click and Collect. My order is 10p short of your threshold for free Click and Collect.

 

Because you will charge me £2 for this, I will simply purchase elsewhere. I can have free shipping with Amazon, to home. Or I could just walk into your store and hope you have stock…

 

I understand that shipping to home is unprofitable – that’s why many retailers offer free Click and Collect and charge for home delivery. Charging for Click and Collect is short-sighted and, frankly, not acceptable. You have deliveries to store anyway, whilst it costs me to drive to you, then you charge me £2 for the privilege!

 

I would much rather support John Lewis than a faceless US-based Internet retailer and I urge you to reconsider your policy on charging for Click and Collect – not just for this transaction but for all customers, all of the time.

 

Yours Faithfully,

Mark Wilson”

I could buy another item to take me other the limit. There are even threads on Internet forums advising of the cheapest item to buy! I could even return the extra item immediately after collection (increasing costs to John Lewis as they process a refund). All of this is gaming the system though and it increases friction in the transaction, which translates to inconvenience to me as the customer.

Call to Action

If you, like me, feel John Lewis needs to take another look at its Click and Collect policy, feel free to use the text above as the basis for your communication. Contact details for John Lewis are on their website (or you can email Customer Services directly). The John Lewis Partnership website also has a list of Directors who manage John Lewis’ commercial activity and develop the strategy and business plan for the company.