Cashier downtime in retail vsf 07 12 11 final web

Background Cashier Downtime
In a retail environment, with the enormous push to improve customer shopping experience, there is a need to keep
as many checkout lanes open as can be and thus bring the customer wait time to the minimum or in other words
reach the idle state of one customer in a lane with no wait time. But to reach this stage, the store has to put an
enormous cost on the payroll.
Due to intense competition and customer service becoming a very critical
parameter, store managers generally ignore the cost involved in keeping
excessive lanes open and hence the payroll cost gets skewed towards the
cashiers. This is further compounded by a tendency of the management to
ignore operational expenses of the front lanes in the name of
customer service.
This can lead to the neglect of other parts of the store particularly with a
limited store budget.
A scenario wherein the focus is to reduce checkout time by keeping the
cost skewed towards the front lanes can lead to the store managers
keeping the workforce on the front lanes and thus overlooking other
important areas in the store which though may not be critical but act as
hygiene factors and aid in store sales.
• An example could be the spillover of a liquid in an aisle making the
entire aisle dangerous for walking which could either lead to no sales
of products in that aisle or even injuries. It could also put off
customers from future visits to the store due to a feeling of untidiness.
• Another scenario could be a lack of focus on the backroom operations
which could lead to empty aisles, inadequate replenishment or wrong
inventory stocking; all three contributing to lost sales.
Thus, even though providing excellent service through minimal wait time
is an important store performance criteria it should not lead to reduced
attention towards other parts of the store.
Cashier Downtime Analysis
Cashier downtime is defined as the amount of time when a cashier is
logged-on to a register but is not ringing a transaction or in other words
the cashier is waiting for a guest to arrive in his lane.
Each minute of this time costs the payroll and leads to no productive
output as the cashier keeps manning the lane. If the cashier was not
manning the register waiting for customers he/she could be used to
perform other store activities. This would increase store productivity and
also would help in reducing store payroll costs as additional workforce
would not be required to perform those tasks.
But not all cashier downtime is useful time. An example to illustrate this is
as follows:
Consider a scenario wherein a cashier ends a transaction and there is no
new guest in his lane. The cashier waits for a minute before the new guest
arrives and the cashier starts ringing the transaction. This intervening time
period when the cashier was free is not useful downtime as the cashier
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