Increase Your Sales With Self-Checkout

Self-checkout systems are a time- and money-saving tool for retailers. According to FMI (Food Marketing Institute) research, nearly 30% of food retailers are experimenting with self-checkout systems. Tom Clark, director of Clark's Markets in Aspen, CO, is one of these retailers. Clark's father, Tom, founded Clark's Markets in 1978 in response to an obvious lack of grocery store competition in Aspen. At that time, only one grocery store existed in Aspen – a regional chain called City Market now owned by the Kroger Company. Today Clark's Markets boasts approximately 400 company-wide employees and seven additional locations throughout Colorado. he retailer continues to be a grocery store that caters to Aspen residents, service industry employees, and the ski resort business.

"Due to Aspen's high cost of living," says Clark, "many people live outside the area and commute as much as one and a half hours each way to get to and from work." This commute poses a distinct challenge when it comes to recruiting and retaining employees, a challenge that ultimately results in sparsely manned checkout stations. This issue, coupled with high-volume rush periods – lunchtime and closing time for the ski slopes specifically – creates bursts of customer volume that can be difficult to mitigate. "Implementing a self-checkout system was a solution that might remedy not only the labor issue but also would control peaks in customer traffic," says Clark. He decided to implement U-Scan, StoreNext's self-checkout system, in his Aspen store.

Clark's Markets has a history of using StoreNext's retail technologies. ScanMaster is StoreNext's POS system, and all Clark's Markets' registers operate using the ScanMaster solution. Because U-Scan runs on the ScanMaster POS platform, Clark decided to skip the potential for complicated integration by maintaining a consistent POS platform across all checkouts.