What can we do to prevent customers abandoning their shopping baskets and not spending because of queues at our tills?

If you only have one or two tills in your stores, you are limited in the number of extra staff you can deploy as a way to reduce queues and prevent walk-aways. But prevention is important – not only to minimise lost sales, but also to cut down on staff time spent putting products from abandoned baskets back on the shelves.

But Tensator general manager Kevin Hickson says there are things that can be done. He recommends creating in-queue merchandising with high margin impulse purchase items. He says that not only does it hold shoppers’ attention while they wait, but can create a sales uplift and substantially improve the margin of the overall basket.

To speed up the queue without opening more tills, Hickson suggests retailers try a call-forward system, which can increase customer flow by 25 per cent. In a trial at one US store, there were 164 walk-aways from the tills in a week without such a system, and only six a week later after it was installed.

He adds that updated versions of the ticket systems supermarkets use at their deli counters are another option, because they disperse the queue completely and the ticket can provide an estimated serving time, leaving the customer free to browse the rest of the store.

His final advice is that retailers consider positioning tills where there are likely to be queues towards the rear of a store to prevent another trend – walk-on-bys – where the sight of a queue puts consumers off entering the store at all.