A couple of years ago, I was musing about how miserable an experience it is to trudge around in giant warehouse-style retail outlets with their concrete floors and gloomy aisles:
Large, warehouse retail environments are damned unfriendly... nearly all the home repair and office supply stores fall into this category. [...] I am betting there's a big market for a friendly office store, with a more sensible (task-based?) layout.
Dan Hartung replied that a lot of thought went into those store designs, and while I was willing to concede the point, it still seemed like there was an opportunity being missed.
That made this excerpt I found today in Baseline (by far the best business technology magazine in existence, and kudos to Ziff Davis for that) all the more satisfying:
[S]hopping experience at Lowe's is not haphazardly guided. Lowe's shuns standard warehouse techniques such as "pallet drops" and "dump bins" where merchandise is put at the end, or middle of aisles, to move it quickly. Instead, the company uses "planograms"—data-driven shelf plans—to influence where and at what level it puts every product it sells.
...Lowe's cares what goes where. Consider one of its most important aisles: fashion lighting. End-caps at Lowe's can have items such as chandeliers with Italian crystal beads with prices topping $200. In the aisle itself, lighting fixtures hang against realistic backdrops depicting a living room. Pricier items are typically at eye level, following merchandising conventions, with high-turnover impulse purchases such as dimmer switches and 40-watt light bulbs always in reach.
Lowe's lighting aisle and other design areas use such "atmospherics" to increase the willingness of customers to buy, says Michael Levy, a retailing expert at Babson College. The key is to allow a customer to visualize a project, easily find items specific to that project and then purchase them.
In all, it sounds as if Lowe's is on the right track. And I have to confess no small amount of satisfaction in the fact that those of us who've had weblogs for years can reference back to conversations that began three and a half years ago and continue them today. Both the increasing success of Lowe's and the increasing popularity of weblogs are proof of what a focus on good user experience can yield.
I don't know if you can use Lowe's relative performance compared to Home Depot to justify their merchandising strategy. Home Depot has twice the revenue of Lowe's, and a better profit margin (6.3% vs. 5.7%). Also, in each of the past four years, Home Depot has increased their market share signicantly more than has Lowe's.
Lowe's might be a fine store - but they are no Home Depot.
Besides, I love warehouse style retailing - it's the only type of store I ever enter nowadays; and obviously a lot of other people love 'em, too.
Lowes also seems to focus more on the typical homeowner than contractors. Home Depot can be a very intimidating place where everyone seems to know where to find things, and they sell stuff in bulk. The casual diy home owner that just needs a lightbulb or a new switchplate has to wade through bin after bin of obscure electrical equipment in search of their needs, in between 4 or 5 electrical guys.
I get the feeling that Lowes will probably make less money at first, by not being so contractor-friendly, but they will eventually win the space as Joan Q. Public shops and spends money there instead of Home Depot (especially given the rise in home improvement shows that show you how to do things without a contractor). Home Depot may be relegated to selling things in lots to real construction types that are getting supplies for jobs.
There is probably room in the space for both types of approaches, as the audiences are clearly different.
I much more prefer Costco-style than whatever it sounds like you would propose. I don't understand why stores (and web sites) attempt to be so fancy when they should be simple and functional.
Hmm. This is starting to look like a gender thing.
I've been noticing something interesting at the super-giant grocery store in my neighborhood, the HEB.
Some years ago, HEB opened a deluxe store for foodies, and took the nearest plain-old HEB intentionally downmarket to avoid cannibalization. But they've gradually been bringing it back up, and one thing I've noticed is more and more one-stop displays. Like they sell packaged sushi on the same display piece as Japanese beer. That sort of thing.
They still have picante sauce in a different aisle from the tortilla chips, though...
i personally *hate* lowe's. hate, hate, hate. they never have anything i need, in fact, they have *less* of everything, it seems, than home depot. home depot may be set up ugly, but they will have what i'm looking for far more often than not. i can't even find an employee to help me when i go into lowe's - at home depot, they are all over the place and (seemingly) glad to help. i tend to think of home depot as more experimental, diy, and geek-friendly, whereas lowe's is for the casual fix-it-yourself-er. but that's just one homo's opinion. (they don't call it homo depot for nuthin'.) other people i know call lowe's "loathes" or "slows", btw.
Here's the thing that often gets lost in high-falutin' conversations about "user experience" -- it can't always be about EVERY user, EVERY time, and it's not alwys the retailer's fault if the user is unhappy. I am a perfect case in point: I just bought my first house. Before, I also usually had a grim time in Home Depot or Loews when I needed a light bulb or something simple, because it felt like I was the new kid in town on the first day of junior high--who are these people? where do I go? It's probably the same for most apartment dwellers. Since you have no need to put together the X-Y-Z project in several steps, it's not in your best interest to spend the few minutes it takes to get oriented--you just want your light bulb. All that said, I've also found HD to be vastly superior in terms of real customer experience--believe me, if you are in over your head with half your kitchen ripped out, and you can find a helpful, knowledgeable person to guide you to the correct materials and techniques, you don't care about concrete floors or "gloomy" aisles or the lack of a barista out front or a WiFi signal so you can blog your bad experience in real-time -- you just want to put your house back together. ("Loews blows" is my favorite of the Loews cracks, btw...)
I cannot STAND large brightly lit warehouse stores. I find them bewildering, and it's impossible to get any help. 3 weeks ago I needed keys copied, and because my local hardware store didn't have the blanks I had to go to Home Depot, where it took 10 minutes to find the right aisle and 20 more minutes to find somebody, anybody, to run the damn key machine. They may have good deals, but we pay for it with frustration and wasted time.
But that's exactly my point Janet--if you had a reason to need to know how to get around Home Depot, like most homeowners do, you'd know where the key machine was, you'd need about 5 other things during the same trip, so you'd drop of the keys, go find the router bit you needed, etc, pick up the keys, no time wasted. I'm telling you, it takes almost no time to memorize the Home Depot layout if you want to.
Idea though: they probably could simply open up a section called Home Depot Jr., or Apartment Depot, with a key machine and light bulbs and picture hangers and the like, with a dedicated person, and an espresso machine. Wouldn't take that much room or peoplepower and would solve the problem.
I believe I was listening to an NPR segment about Wal-Mart (altho a cursory search of their site doesn't bring it up) about the megastore having a "store" set up in their corporate headquarters, an exact replica of a real store with everything in its place except the customers. It's used to easily plan where every item will go with the reps from each vendor.
On a slightly related note, have you ever noticed product placements at your local grocery store? For example (and maybe this is because I'm a parent of two young ones), all sugar-coated cereals are placed on the lower shelf, in eye and arm shot of children.
JEff - some of the brightest math minds of our times are working on product placement. It's one of the few places were neural networking forecasts have predictive ability.
Funny, two blasts from the past in one week (the other was someone pointing to a two-year-old MeFi thread: my reaction was to see if I'd commented, but it turns out I *posted* it).
Anyway, I recently read a complementary article on category management by vendors. In short, a grocery store might say to Coke, "You know beverages better than we do, and you have national sales data, so tell us what to sell, what to put on sale, and how to shelve it." You'd think it's a bit like We're from the government, and we're here to help you, but in fact retailers practically beg vendors to do this for them. (In part this is because vendors will do it for no cost, versus a third party research firm.) For the most part, it works surprisingly well, with Coke giving advice on how to sell Pepsi while using goodwill to improve its position with the retailer.
But one of the pitfalls the article brings up is that there's a so-called "blindfold test": can a test shopper be taken blindfolded into the aisle as stocked and shelved by the vendor's advice, and still recognize the store? Or has the store lost its uniqueness and become bland?
Thinking about this thread, as well as Anil's '99 comments, I think you're right: a task-oriented layout could have broad appeal. I'm thinking of organizing a Home Depot style store more like a food court, say. And joseph again's idea for an Apartment Depot sounds golden for the right consumer market. But of course, such a service-oriented approach means higher costs -- e.g. seventeen different places where they stock Phillips screwdrivers -- and the Apartment Depot's biggest competitor may well be the hardware aisle at Target.
Also, sometimes I think we shouldn't deny the appeal of the bland -- there are clearly low-cost signifiers at work that draw in consumers, and warehouse-style stores themselves are something of a consumer backlash that is now swinging gradually back the other way. Wal-Mart sticks to low-cost but sacrifices deep inventory. McDonald's sticks to known-quantity burgers and misses out on the better-taste crowd that migrates to BK or Wendy's. Ultimately a store can't please everyone and has to choose the markets in which it will do best.
I had another thought here before I took the dog out but now I'm tired.
No, I don't get it, Joseph. Your scenario wouldn't work for me, because at my Home Depot, there's nobody around to "drop the keys off" with. It is very difficult and time-consuming to find anyone to wait on me there. (And when I do, that person very often cannot answer my questions.)
As for the layout, why should I take the trouble to go to a store often enough to learn its layout when my first experience there is bewildering and annoying? The store is supposed to cater to ME.
I do like the idea of a "Home Depot Light" section. Even though I am a homeowner, I somehow still only buy things one at a time, and that would help.
The store is supposed to cater to ME
But that's kind of the point, Home Depot doesn't much care about someone who comes in to get a key copied. They care about contractors who come in and buy a few tons of concrete and lumber and a couple of thousand saws.
They care about the homeowner who comes in to get instruction and materials to tear apart and rebuild their kitchen.
Home Depot, and I think many of the barebones warehose stores, aren't primarily for customers who are browsing and looking for ideas, they're for customers who know what they want. They do offer services on top of that (advice sections, and renovation consultation type stuff), but that only creates customers who know what they want.
The experience Home Depot (et al) is offering is utilitarian and stark and functional. Get in, pick stuff up, get out. , Lowes (which I've never been in, but there are analogues I can relate to) come at it from a different angle, they want people to browse, to look through their selection and to get ideas there.
Rob, I think you're totally right. Every time I've ever been in any large warehouse store I have gotten the distinct impression that they didn't care if I bought anything or not. And that attitude is certainly off-putting.
But I still can't see those types of stores as "Get in, pick stuff up, get out." I mean, look at my first post -- all I wanted at the Home Depot was to get some keys copied. That's get in, get out, isn't it? And yet it took forever, and was exhausting and annoying. Do you mean maybe, "Get in, pick a LOT of stuff up, get out."?
I work for a company that creates the software that allows these companies to make "planograms." I think you all would be amazed at how much planning goes into all different types of stores. In my opinion, it's fascinating.
You know, maybe this is why I experienced almost child-like delight when I first visited a very small local version of Ace Hardware. I've used both Lowes and Home Depot before and find that they both have their uses for me. But this small, hardwood floor, two level, converted old building had the feel of a 19th century mercantile shopping experience, but with all the modern products in sufficient quantity for most of my needs. Now I go there every once in a while, just to poke around and find something useful in another tightly packed row or corner.