I Have Seen The Liquor Store Of The Future

by Andrew Chalk

This weekend the Goody Goody liquor store chain in Texas will introduce the liquor store of the future at their Greenville Avenue branch. It will not only totally change the consumer buying experience but also lower prices. It even makes the store shelves look totally different and shrinks the store by about half to sell the same number of SKUs (different items). I went to a preview today and it is quite a change.

The first thing you see is that there is no product on shelves, except for one example of each item. In the picture above, there is one bottle of each type of Martell brandy. And it is locked in! Unlike toothpaste shopping in San Francisco, you don’t have to find an assistant to unlock it. You use the QR code on the shelf below and a Goody Goody page appears on your phone with the item you selected. You make menu selections for quantity and size, and then enter your name to start a ticket. 

As you go through the store you pick all the items you want in a similar manner, but now they add to your ticket. 

When finished, you click “Submit”, select a credit card or Google/Apple pay to charge your order, and go over to the counter. Within two minutes, according to Goody Goody President, Scott Jansen, your order is delivered into your hands. There is a board (like a standby list at an airline departure gate) that shows your name and the status of your order, along with all the others that have been submitted.

The robotic back end. Each square is an SKU. The robots carry ordered items over to yellow bins for delivery to the store associate (see image below). One clever feature is that the system keeps track of what's popular and SKUs in more demand are placed in to squares closer to the front, reducing collection time.

So what happened when you hit submit? Behind a wall a robot picked out your order, item by item, and brought it to the Goody Goody staff who serve you. 

Order delivery container.

Why is this better than the familiar liquor store that hasn’t changed since you wore short trousers?

First, a lot less shelf space is needed. Dave, a Goody Goody buyer, showed me Crown Royale on the shelf. Its space is one bottle wide and one bottle deep. “Before,” Dave explained, “the Crown Royale shelf was this long” he gestured, walking eight feet down the case, “and four feet deep”. That was because it was actual inventory (which hopefully did not run out!). Now, the QR code integrates into the inventory at the back of the store where the robots do their work. The situation with vodka was even worse. “The vodka selection was a whole wall long,” said Scott Jansen. Now, it is one bottle for each type of vodka.

So fewer inventory mistakes from empty shelves. 

The staff who spent all day checking, filling, and cleaning shelves are now reassigned to customer service. Result, better service, faster finding things, and help on first time use of the QR code system.

And less shelf space needed. Part way down the existing store is a non-structural wall. Through doorways in it you can peer at a space about half the size of the new store. It is the part of the old store that used to contain shelves (used, for example, for the vodka or Crown Royal) that is no longer needed. Goody Goody owns it and may use it for end-of-line sales events, or sell it to a doctor’s practice that wants to expand in this busy part of town. The point being that less space needed means less rent to pay. That rent has to be priced into every bottle sold, so the overhead cost goes down with the new system. 

I forgot to ask if Goody Goody had asked a patent expert to find every patentable idea in the system and had their lawyers file. 

What about the cost of the robot system? It costs a lot up front of course, “but should recoup its costs in a year or so if it works and proves popular” according to Jansen. 

That is now the task at hand. After what store manager Armondo Gonzalez says has been two months shaking it down (“including putting through all the transactions from last Christmas Eve, simulating that massive customer load” he says) it is time for user acceptance tests. What techies call ‘product market fit’. Jansen thinks that will take about six months and the whole staff is approaching it with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation.

Since the system has been in beta use for two months there has been a little customer feedback. Consumers under 40 love it “It just makes sense/no lines/things should always have been done like this”. Women 40-60 just pick it up straightaway and come back because they prefer it. Men 40-60 need a more explicit description of its advantages, but come round to it. Men 60+ see it as just one more symptom of the continuous and irrevocable decline of human civilization. Otherwise, they are happy to get their drink.

I think it will be a big hit, albeit after some tweaks (the history of retail is littered with the graves of good ideas). At that point, Goody Goody should go on a war footing to deploy it in all 24 stores while the big guys run to catch up. 

I promised Scott Jansen that I would return to hear his conclusion in six months. But, if the robot system is really successful, I may be asking a robot, the new President of Goody Goody liquor.