Prisma has always referred to itself as family super market. They’ve got the wide aisles for the-trollies-and-two-baby-buggies-next-to-each-other navigation. They’ve got the broad selection of food and non-food for everyone from newborn to grandpa. They’ve even got clothes, school supplies and spare tires. The only thing they didn’t have, was a pleasant experience for their family customers. Shopping with kids was exactly that: shopping with kids.
Not a lot of research was required to find this out. Simple observation in-store demonstrated the 77 different ways parents work to keep their offspring distracted and entertained, so that mom and dad can get the shopping done.
Some notable observations were:
- The racing family: shop as if your life depended on it and hope that you manage to rush by the toy aisle;
- The lost family: kids wandering off in many directions at once with parents spending more time looking for lost descendants than groceries;
- The bribe family: parents giving their child something to drink or eat, just to keep them quiet so that the shopping can get done;
- The educational family: teaching the kids how to shop and look at best before dates, helping to load groceries on the check-out belt.
Of course, one of the biggest obstacles to a happy shopping experience, is the check-out itself. All that candy, so close to so many surprisingly nimble little fingers. And with a queue, so much time to look and beg for some (and throw a tantrum or two). For the small people, an additional challenge was, that even if they wanted to help unload the trolley onto the belt, it was too high. Ditto for packing the grocery bags: “I want to help but can’t reach up.”
Prisma felt, that although this was something that customers considered “just life” (shopping with kids is shopping with kids), that they could improve this experience drastically.
The solution was simple. One fruit keeps a small person busy for up to 20 minutes. Enough to get the everyday shopping done. So Prisma started offering free fruit to children during shopping.
Prisma also rebuilt check-out stations to be suitable for children, and made them child friendly with added play walls and stairs. Queue time becomes fun and now they can help their parents load products onto the belt. And once the shopping is done, wider parking spaces for families closer to the entrance of the supermarket help keep door dings at bay, too.
