What's So Bad About The Countertop?

What is the counter, truly? A barrier between a customer and a cashier. Wasted space where products can’t be displayed. A place for long, annoying lines to form. An arbitrary place to end the buying process.

Plenty of businesses are realizing that they don’t want any of those things.

And there’s a reason. Surveys find that shoppers who talk to a sales associate are 43% more likely to purchase something, and their tickets are 81% larger. These are massive numbers. For every employee wasting away behind a counter, waiting to ring someone up, that’s a lost sales associates. And more importantly, that’s lose revenue.

When an employee is stuck behind a counter, they can’t help customers make their decisions, and that hurts the bottom line. Even in the era of growing online shopping, there is a reason customers visit brick-and-mortar: They want help, and they want advice.