It's in the Details

By Pat Burns, General Manager

Clem Nilan, our former General Manager, used to tell me that running a successful grocery store was no big deal. It was just thousands of little details that needed to be attended to. Over the past month you might not have noticed some of those small details, but subtle changes are yielding great results for City Market.

  1. In the Wellness Department, Steff Borst, our Assistant Manager for Wellness, Lynn Ellen Schimoler, our Store Manager, and Brent Demers, our Facilities Manager, worked together to change the look of the Wellness Department. By taking out the old service counter, they created  more open access to the department, along with creating a new 4' x 6' display island that has significantly increased the number of products shoppers have access to.
     
  2. At the same time as the Wellness transformation was happening, James and Jason, our Produce Managers, were installing new shelving throughout the Produce Department. The new displays that they found were approximately 6 inches narrower than the old displays, but they made up for that difference with increased height of the display. This accomplished two desired outcomes: more space in the aisles for our customers and their carts and a greater amount of display surface for putting out product.
     
  3. The third small change came in the form of a software upgrade for our cash register system. Our IT Manager, Kyle Larson, discovered that one of the best benefits of this new upgrade allowed us to not automatically print receipts for every transaction. We can now print receipts on demand at the end of the transaction. Kyle informed me that this change will reduce our register tape usage by approximately 250 miles of register tape. Using the width of the receipts in the calculation, this amount of paper is easily enough to cover all of Chittenden County (useful facts from a computer person!).
     
  4. The last change, and this one is not going to be a small one, will be taking place around late September or early October when we finish the restructuring of the display areas in Prepared Foods (which is home to our hot & cold food bars, our deli, our cheese counter, the bakery and Grab & Go cooler). I'll save more of the details for next month's newsletter, but we will soon have diagrams available to show you the changes we have planned. These changes are being implemented to improve flow throughout the store by reducing traffic jams in the Prepared Foods area.

As you can see from just these few examples of small changes (and large ones!), we continue to look for ways to improve the layout of our store to reduce the congestion and to enhance your overall shopping experience at City Market.  If you have ideas about what would make your shopping experience better, please let us know.  We’re all ears!

Thanks for your patronage,

Pat