A supermarket POS: thousands of items, thin margins, fast queues

Grocery is unlike other retail in three ways: the number of items is enormous, the margins are thin, and the customer's experience is dominated by how long the queue is.

Everything below follows from those three.

Scanning speed is the product

At a basket of 25 items, one extra second per item is 25 seconds per customer. Across 400 customers a day that is nearly three hours of till time.

What to check:

• Scanner quality. A good imaging scanner reads a crumpled barcode first time. A cheap one needs two or three attempts, and that is where the seconds go.
• No confirmation dialogues on routine actions.
• Weighed items in one motion — the scale integrated so the cashier places, the weight arrives, done.
• Payment in one tap for the common method.

Seepeak hour speed; the same arithmetic applies at a grocery till.

Thousands of items means catalogue discipline

A supermarket with 8,000 SKUs cannot be managed by memory.

• Manufacturer barcodes wherever they exist, your own only for loose and repacked goods
• Categories that match the aisles, so a staff member can find things
• Cost price on every product, without exception — with 3% net margins, a wrong cost makes a product look profitable when it is not
• A dead-stock report — anything not sold in 90 days is occupying shelf space that has a rent value

Shelf labels and price changes

Grocery prices move constantly, with supplier promotions and cost changes.

The requirement:change a price, print only the affected labels. A system that makes you reprint a category will lead to shelf prices that disagree with till prices, and that is both a customer dispute and a compliance question.

Seebarcode and label printing.

Shrink is most of your profit

At a 3–5% net margin, a 1% shrink rate is between a fifth and a third of your profit.

The controls that matter most in grocery:

• Cycle counting weighted towards high-value and high-theft categories. Seestock count
• Receiving against purchase orders, checked at the door
• Expiry management on chilled, fresh and dated goods
• Waste recorded with reasons, so the pattern is visible
• Refund and void permissions tightly held

Seeshrinkage for the diagnostic method.

Supplier promotions and rebates

Grocery margin often comes as much from supplier terms as from the sell price. Your system should let you record:

• Promotional cost prices with start and end dates
• Buy-x-get-y deals as they were actually agreed
• Which promotion applied to which purchase

If promotional costs are not recorded, your margin reporting is wrong during the promotion and wrong again after it.

Multiple tills

Grocery runs several tills at once, which makes three things essential:

• Fast till open and close, with per-till cash reconciliation
• A spare till that can be opened for the peak — a browser cashier on a laptop, no extra hardware
• Offline that works per till, so one terminal losing the network does not stop the lane

See theoffline comparison.

The weekly numbers

1. Gross margin by category — where is it moving?
2. Shrink by category
3. Dead stock — items not sold in 90 days
4. Out-of-stocks on your top 200 items
5. Average items per basket and average basket value
6. Till throughput at peak

Out-of-stocks on the top 200 is the most under-watched number in grocery. A customer who cannot find a staple does not buy a substitute; they go somewhere that has it, and they take the rest of the basket with them.

Wameed handles grocery with full inventory, supply chain, weighed items and label printing; see thefeatures page.