Sunday 11/11/2007
Business, Design

A new grocery store opened in my neighborhood last week. Fresh & Easy claims to provide high-quality food at “unbelievable” prices in a friendly, small-store format. They further claim caring for the environment and an emphasis on local sourcing of produce.

Our little slice of Los Angeles is grocery-starved, so Thursday’s hotly anticipated opening was well-attended. When we visited on Sunday we found that the produce and well-hyped prepared food shelves were nearly bare. The store was only moderately busy, so we plowed ahead in search of a few staples and to check out the selection.

Afterward, my wife claimed she sort of wished she had a blog because she felt like writing about how disappointed she was. I felt similarly; it seemed that the store lived up to little of its advanced billing.

• One row of produce with all produce wrapped in plastic.
• Many rows of the usual packaged goods (cereal, toothpaste, etc.) but with surprisingly limited selection in each category.
• Low shelves to create an open feeling but with rows ending too close to the edges of the store, creating congestion at the endcaps.
• Dairy and other products paired with organic equivalents, but with excessive price premiums for organic, and par or higher prices for the standard.
• 100% self-scan checkout, but with none of the visual or geographic cues that would help patrons unfamiliar with the store (as all are at this point) queue up efficiently or navigate the checkout system quickly. People were so confused just trying to choose a line that staff were stepping in to ring people up just to create a sense of order.
• The offer of “$5 off your first order of $20 or more” was marred by a (common) alcohol restriction and a (surprising) dairy sctrictre, making our $32 tab (how did we spend over $12 on dairy?) ineligible for the discount.
• And the “free reusable shopping bag, replaced for life?” A common medium-gauge plastic bag with thin handles, little better than the usual grocery-store plastic bag we hope to displace with reusable bags.

Truly forgettable.

What does this have to do with software design? Your product has to do what it says on the box.

The top claims your product makes are those captured in the name of the product. Fresh & Easy needs to be thoroughly both. If it is Fresh-ish and sort of Easy, you lose. In Fresh & Easy’s case, the produce was fresh, but this freshness was masked and made uncertain by overpackaging. The environmental message was further diminished by this overpackaging. And there was little ease navigating the poorly-laid out transverse aisles or the unfamiliar checkout. Never mind that customers take longer to check out when self-scanning, and feel personally responsible for system errors while scanning, both facts further diminishing any sense of ease.

The secondary claims made in advance of a sale are also important; it is with these claims that you hope to position your product, align it with the wishes of the customer. Follow-through is essential. The non-environmentally-friendly and frankly quite substandard “reusable bag,” the high prices, the narrow selection (you can have Yoplait or the store brand of yogurt, for example), and the complete lack of pleasant retail surprises all fly in the face of claims made on the Fresh & Easy website and the several direct mail pieces they sent to neighborhood residents in advance of the opening.

To my wife, this lack of breadth, of depth, and of the human touch smacks of cynicism befitting Fresh & Easy’s parent company, UK retail giant Tesco. We were prepared to give Fresh ‘n Easy the benefit of the doubt, but we have already tagged the store as “emergencies only.” And we’re already calling it “Fresh and Sleazy.”