Wegmans Operational Excellence

Regular readers know of my long standing love affair with Wegmans, the Rochester, NY, based grocery chain. What makes the company so great is their willingness to try new things, an unwavering commitment to quality, and rigorous process discipline.

An example of their process discipline is the Items Per Minute board; here they list how fast each cashier is checking out the customers. This board will be posted in every store and it tells the cashiers that items per minute matters, a lot.

This makes perfect sense. If, as a company, I am efficient in checkout then I need less registers (capital) and less cashiers (expense) to collect payment. Note that at Wegmans cashiers not only scan the product they bag it and place it in your cart.

Fast checkout also provides the customer with a positive experience; it doesn't take as long to check out (which is also the exact moment that a customer decides that they no longer want to be in the store).

By contrast consider my last experience I had at the local Giant. Heather was talking to Stacey (my cashier) about how big a douche (her word, not mine) her Dad was being. Stacey was a nice enough friend to stop working (and checking out is when I no longer want to be in the store) to discuss this with her friend. Stacey also didn't bother to place any of the items into plastic bags and looked dumbfounded as I stood waiting. Eventually she relented, haughtily overstuffed the bags, and I went on my merry way.

At Wegmans they place the items in a bag, in a cart, in half the time. They get to realize the cost savings of using less people and I get a better experience.