A consumer economy is driven by the purchases of consumers. To that end, many studies, strategies and methods have been performed and developed in order to encourage consumer spending on various products. It is also commonly known that customer service is a large factor in generating the good will of consumers and that good will generates purchases. To this end, providing an intuitive and expected shopping experience encourages both good will and sales.
One aspect of the common consumer experience is the check-out aisle. The check-out aisle is essentially a queue, or a number of queues, for customers to interact with cashiers and tally their items for payment. The usual construction is a plurality of parallel islands, each one headed with a cashier's station. These parallel islands form aisles therebetween. By convention, the sides of the aisle are named in accordance with a customer's perception as he is walking down the aisle towards the cashier, with the side on the customer's right side being termed “customer right” and conversely the other side being “customer left.” The cashier may be located on either the customer right or customer left sides. Check-out aisles are commonly disparaged in the culture and any improvement to the experience is generally noticed. One common failing is the indication of which aisles may or may not be open. In practice, most merchants with multiple check-out aisles have some sort of indicator, a sign or light, to tell consumers when an aisle is open or closed. Often, the aisle may be lit when open or not when closed as a further indicator. However, a system is only as good as the human operating it. Many times, the cashier may or may not get the proper signage or lighting activated or deactivated to adequately let consumers know the aisle's status. While this may prove a minor annoyance when an aisle is open and indicated as closed, it can become a major inconvenience when the aisle is closed and is indicated as being open, which can happen if the cashier takes a quick break. What is needed then is an automated indication of an aisle's status. Such indication may desirably activate or extinguish the aisle lighting and should have an override system for human intervention. The system may also be adapted to the center-of-store aisles, or “gondolas,” and aisle end caps.
It is also well known in the art that appropriate lighting may enhance the display of product. It is for this reason that showrooms were developed to showcase items like automobiles, large appliances, and larger furniture. However, lighting systems in the art of grocery merchandizing is far behind other arts—being limited to utilitarian lighting to make sure people can see product. Interactive lighting displays are not generally utilized in grocery aisles.
The present invention is a method by which an aisle is automatically indicated as being open or closed and the system and components necessary for the method to work. The present invention represents a departure from the prior art in that the method and system of the present invention allows for automatic status indication of a given aisle as either being ready for business or closed. The system is keyed to the physical presence of a cashier so that an aisle may be automatically indicated as open or closed without intentional human intervention. It is important to note that the aisle indication is that the product in the check-out aisle is lit, thereby automatically drawing a customer's attention to the product as an open aisle is identified. This lighting enhances the customer experience and showcases product in the “impulse buy” region of the store where customers must go and spend some time before being checked out, thus increasing the likelihood that a customer will buy an impulse item.