Cut the Line to Keep Customers

This article is brought to you by Mashgin. 

For convenience stores, a large part of the appeal to customers is in the name: convenience. The average customer spends less than four minutes on a trip inside a c-store—and they’re sensitive to anything that could make it take longer than expected.

“Great service is table stakes,” said Jack Hogan, senior vice president of partnerships at Mashgin. “And in convenience, speed is great service.”

That’s backed up by data from Mashgin. After surveying 2,500 adult American shoppers, Mashgin found that 64% would leave a c-store without making a purchase due to a long line.

“The insidious thing about long lines is that they are a silent customer failure,” Hogan said. “There isn't a clear moment you can blame for why people stop coming back, but you just start to see total visitors decrease as your margins decline on reduced volume.”

So how much does the number of people in line matter?

With three people in line, 30% of shoppers would leave without buying something, Mashgin found. With four people in line, that number jumped to half of the surveyed shoppers. 

As the length of the line creeps up, customers reported that they were increasingly likely to be deterred: at a line with five people, 65% of shoppers would leave; at six, 75% would leave; and at seven, 80% would leave. Once a line reaches 10 or more people, 100% of shoppers said that they would exit the store without making a purchase, Mashgin said.

And a bad experience could mean more than just the lost dollars from one particular day. Mashgin’s report said it only took one bad experience for 22% of shoppers to never return to a store. At two visits with long wait times, 34% of shoppers said they would never come back. 

The good news, though, is that Mashgin found that 73% of shoppers said they were more likely to come back to a store after having a fast and easy checkout experience. 

“Mashgin’s AI-assisted checkout is four times faster than traditional checkout,” the company’s report said. 

The latest version, designed specifically for convenience stores, is what the company calls its Power Counter. The device doesn’t have the bulky middle of older machines, meaning store staff is less removed from shoppers.

“Now customers and staff can see and greet each other directly across the counter like they're accustomed to, just with a super-fast service experience on top of it,” Hogan said. “This makes it incredibly easy to run multiple transactions at once while servicing customers who need help with things like age-restricted products.”

This is the second article in a two-part series from Mashgin. Read part one to learn more about how AI-assisted checkout can increase labor efficiency.

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