We went to Wegmans with a retail expert. Here's what he spotted.
For more than 30 years, when the world’s top retailers want to understand what makes their customers tick, they’ve called Paco Underhill.
He founded New York City-based Envirosell, which dispatches teams of shopper-watchers to study retail practices scientifically, drawing conclusions from the data and turning those conclusions into recommendations to improve design, customer perception and sales.
Underhill calls himself a “retail anthropologist,” capable of cracking key questions: Why does a customer walk by a certain display while she lingers at another? Where are a customer’s eyes going when he turns down a grocery aisle.
Microsoft, McDonald's, adidas and Estee Lauder have used his services.
Underhill wrote the book on retail. Actually, he's written several: "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping," "Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping," "What Women Want: The Science of Female Shopping," and this year’s "How We Eat: The Brave New World of Food and Drink."
To tour a supermarket with Underhill is to experience it in a completely different way, to see the science of retail at work. As part of its look at the world of New York-based supermarket chain Wegmans, the USA Today Network New York invited Underhill to tour a Wegmans in Harrison, in Westchester County, New York.
Here are 18 takeaways from the two-hour tour:
Location: The store is in a corporate park within easy reach of three major highways: Interstates 287 and 95, and the Hutchinson River Parkway. “It sits in a lovely office complex here and they probably got a really good deal on this land,” Underhill says. “But they also recognized that a significant portion of their shopper lives and works within a mile of here. And that’s really important.”
Sweet smell of commerce: “The reason why flowers are here at the front door is to get your saliva glands working,” he says. “Flowers, bread, all of those things are really important up here because you are a much less-disciplined shopper if your saliva glands are working.”
One-track mind: At the back of the store, but high enough to be visible from the front, a model train circles a track. “Little details like this means your 4-year-old falls in love,” he says. “And a 4-year-old can be an advocate.”
Barriers falling, Take One: Just inside the front door, Underhill stops at a refrigerated case labeled: “EZ meals. Chef created. No prep, no cleanup,” in which are pre-seasoned steaks, a Caesar salad, salmon on cedar plank and dessert options. “One of the things that I like about the store is that finally they have broken up some of the religiousness about what's where,” he says. “I am walking in the door and there is steak, salad, salmon. I mean, this is something where — if somebody is in a hurry, here — I could go, ‘Well, I don't have to shop the rest of the store. I could just get it right here.’ There is a complete meal, but this is all selective. Do you think this is the cheapest form of meat? No. Do we think this is the cheapest form of fish? No. But they've done a nice job about staging it.”
Tastes of the season: Stepping into the produce section, Underhill’s eyes dart everywhere. “Part of what is cool is the focus on education. Part of what they’re doing is training people (with signs that read) ‘Tastes of the season.’ You see it in various places.”
Barriers falling, Take Two: If the tomatoes on the vine in the produce section get you thinking about making a cheese board, at Wegmans, you don’t have to remember to grab the mozzarella when you reach the cheese section. Next to those tomatoes is a “Tastes of the Season” display with fresh mozzarella, roasted red peppers and pesto. “It’s grab and go,” Underhill. “All right here.”
Farm fresh: “I think it’s also interesting that they have put up on the walls pictures of some of their farmers. What I like here is that they’re telling you where the farms are,” he says. “That’s something that a national chain could never do.”
Frozen fresh: The produce section brims with fresh fruit. “One of the ironies here is so much of the produce section in the U.S. markets is seasonal based, meaning that if you walked in this store in February, do you know where the freshest produce is? In the frozen food section. That’s because that's where blueberries have been picked and frozen right away. Whereas the blueberries that you're seeing here in February were harvested in Mexico and spent two weeks on the road getting to you.”
The light is right in produce: An apple will never look as good as it does in the store, he says. “Part of what we’re looking at here is theatrical lighting, a certain degree of staging. They are doing a very creative job of bundling. It isn’t buying one apple. It’s buying 12.”
A tactile experience: Watching a man comparing tomatoes by holding them in his hand, Underhill says the produce section hasn’t always been such a tactile environment, and it isn’t that way everywhere. “Up until the 1930s, we weren't allowed to touch the produce when we bought it, because there was somebody there to fill up the bag,” he says. “You go to a farmer's market in Europe now and you try to touch the produce, they will yell at you.”
Speak your language: Max Zeigerman, service manager, wears a nametag that shows he also speaks Russian. Wegmans employees speak 120 different languages and showing that on a nametag makes good business sense, says Underhill. "His brief conversation with a customer who speaks Russian earns loyalty for this store to a degree to which no other interaction does."
A party to go: In the cheese section, a party platter is ready to go, with cubed cheese, salami and pepperoni, olives and a few grapes in a plastic clamshell tray. “I like it. I think it’s a terrific idea, but part of what it’s getting back to is packaging. Convenience buying is something that — particularly for an affluent market like this — is really popular.”
Crossover: In the meat section, a case holds chicken thighs, potatoes and green beans, with a QR code for a recipe for sheet pan garlic herb chicken. Follow the code and it will open the recipe, the ingredients, and the nutritional information. Click “Shop Ingredients” and a page of ingredients with prices appears. Online shoppers can add them to their cart with a click. “I like this crossover. In the context of the meat section, they’re also doing vegetables: potatoes and green beans,” Underhill says.
Frozen in time: Arriving in the frozen food section, Underhill stops. “I think this is one of the places that needs reinvention. The grocery chain that I worked on in Brazil broke up the aisles so that, rather than being 90-degree angles, they were 45-degree angles. You saw more of it as you walked down.”
Fresher frozen: “No merchant has done a particularly great job of teaching you how to consume the healthiest, cheapest and freshest,” he says. “People's misunderstanding of what goes on in the frozen food section is something that we should correct. Because if I want the freshest broccoli, that's where I find it.”
Elsewhere, Underhill makes statements borne of years of research into what makes shoppers tick, and how different shoppers behave and read cues throughout the market.
Signs of age: In the yogurt aisle, signs reading Greek, Blended and so on are printed in white letters on a yellow background. “I can promise you that the person who designed this sign is under age 30,” he says. “Because as we age, the lenses in our eyes yellow. I’m 70, and the contrast between the white and the yellow is nowhere near as prominent as it is if you’re 25 years old.” There are other tweaks he’d make, when it comes to the placement of signs in the beer and deli sections, where they seem haphazardly placed, a rare misstep for Wegmans.
Signs of gender: He looks at the sign hanging high over the end of aisle 12B: Family Pack, Potato Chips, Pretzels, Tortilla Chips, Salsa, Natural Snacking. “I can guarantee you that the person who hung these signs was male.” Men, he says, are “much more willing to look up while shopping, while women often have much more focus on the ground. When we look up, we lose control of our immediate body bubble. (A woman’s) radar for other people is much more acute (than a man’s).”
Traffic cop at the checkout: Underhill arrives back at the front of the store to the checkout — called “cash wrap” in the business. It’s where he finds one of the things he liked best at Wegmans: a smiling manager directing traffic to open registers when the lines get full. “This is something which drives me nuts at Walmart, at Target at Kroger at whatever, that there isn’t a manager role, going: ‘Open a new register.’ ‘No, you can go over here.’ ‘It’s better if you were in that line.’ However positive the experience is, over the body of the store, this is where it gets torpedoed.’”
Having toured the store for two hours, Underhill likes what he has seen.
“I would give it a good, healthy B, or a B-plus,” he says. “There are things that they're doing really, really well, but there's a bunch of stuff that we saw here which are just are reasonably easy fixes. One of the things that I love about retail is that doesn't matter how well you're doing it, you can always do it better.”
WEGMANS AND THE WORLD
The USA TODAY Network is exploring how Wegmans is adapting to our changing world. We'll learn insights from Wegmans workers, sit in on a rare interview with top Wegmans leadership, dive deep into the chain's location decisions, visit one of the newest and most unlikely grocery store spots, find out how prepared foods get a second act, learn the story behind the stores' iconic tote bags and more. Along the way, we'll reveal how Wegmans' business practices affect our communities, its workers and the environment.
This article originally appeared on New York State Team: Wegmans tour: 18 things retail expert Paco Underhill discovered
