Sales floor

Less than half of the sales floor of a grocery store lies on a customer’s path at all, as a study using in-store radio tracking has measured. The other half costs the same rent, the same lighting, the same shelf maintenance. Cortex places zone footfall and dwell time next to category revenue, margin and space costs and calculates revenue and footfall per square meter, zone by zone. The area that has only been costing rent for weeks thus gets a number that can be placed next to the area beside it.

The path leads past the shelf with the strategic category because it lies behind a dead end or because nothing draws the customer there. Cortex measures category penetration, meaning the share of visitors who reach a zone at all, and the transitions between zones, and places both next to the baskets. What is missing is rarely demand but the path, and the path can be relocated with placement, signage and promotion.

Density

Before the end of the workday, the entrance is crowded, and whoever comes in stops behind the door until the way is clear. Cortex counts people per minute and direction at the entrance, reads the density in the zone behind it and places opening hours, the promotion calendar and the footfall of previous weeks next to it. Research shows that conversion falls as footfall rises when capacity does not follow. The bottleneck at the entrance thus becomes a figure with time and duration and not an experience of the staff at the door.

Five floor stands in the center aisle of a supermarket, and the aisle’s share of revenue falls, although more goods are displayed. Without the stands, it was 11.5 percent higher, and customers touched a product seven times as often. Cortex measures flow rate and congestion time in the main aisles and in front of the high-revenue zones and places the shelf stocking plan, delivery plan and promotion plan next to them. The pallet that stands in the main aisle at peak time thus gets a price in revenue, and shelf stocking gets a time in which it costs nothing.

There is congestion in front of the promotional area because many want to get there, and precisely for that reason fewer buy there. Other customers attract and deter at the same time, as research on paths in grocery stores describes it. In the fitting room, the same curve tips over, because beyond a certain level of traffic revenue falls, as items left behind no longer find their way back to the sales floor. Cortex reads entry rate and fitting room traffic, waiting time and return-to-floor time and presents the return as a task before goods that are still available in the system go missing.

Interpretation

A long dwell time in front of the shelf counts as interest, and often it is the opposite, namely searching, comparing without result, coming back. Cortex reads dwell time together with changes of direction, repeated movements and re-entry into the same zone and calculates it against the purchase at the checkout. Only the purchase per minute in front of the shelf tells whether the time was revenue or frustration.

The customer who cannot find the product leaves a trail of search time in the wrong zone, a change of direction, a question at the service desk or an abandonment. Cortex places this trail next to the planogram and product location and identifies the items that are in the wrong place or go unnoticed along the path. Search time thus becomes a metric per item and zone, and the answer is a placement, a notice on the screen or a corrected planogram.

Proof

Two stores, remodeled identically, same costs, same layout, same colors, and one increases revenue by twelve percent, the other by one. Revenue alone does not explain the difference. Cortex measures footfall, paths, dwell time and zone conversion per layout version, before and after, and calculates them against the investment. A remodel thus gets a proof that goes beyond the revenue curve, and its impact can be tracked over months, for as long as research was able to measure it.

The same calculation runs not once a year but every week, because every zone is a position with costs and returns and every location a comparison with the next. Cortex shows which area in the network carries too little everywhere and which only here, which remodel can be repeated and which was a peculiarity of the location. The sales floor thus turns from a rent item into a managed metric that can be planned, compared and improved.