RATIONALIZATION OF SHOP WORK, SHOPS AND RETAIL TRADE

A small, but growing method of retailing being introduced in Britain, is the discount store.

Costs are : held down and minies mut by sing, minimum staff, equipment and display. Disused churches and cinemas are rented for cheapness and ranges of consumer durables sold straight from the carton.

Some specialize in electrical goods or carpets, furniture and so on. Similar types of shops existed in the 1930s-and the 1830s-the great danger being that goods were cheap not because cost-cutting, but because defective stock and brands of specially-made cheap goods were being sold Rack-jobbing is a method by which a manufacturer takes rack-space in a supermarket. He guarantees the shop owners uses his orce state for supply, but uses his own pricing, marketing, merchandizing and removal of unsold stock.

Another system which has developed in the United States The specially-built out-oftown shopping centre. This has anything from 50 to 200 shops with bus transport specially laid on.

Britain, such shopping complexes have been mainly kept to town centres, though propertymen and financiers are at the moment considering how profitable they could be on out-of-town sites country.

Today in a modern store, all pretence selling is service rapidly being dispensed with. Any sales assistant who tries to be helpful customers is is liable be accused by management of time-wasting.

While one person is being attended to in detail, selling time for ten others may be lost. Even when a method of selling is advantageous to shopper or the shopworkerand many prefer supermarkets to any other system-this is purely incidental and secondary the fundamental requirement to make more profit.

leading retail specialist wrote in 1964:

'It is fairly true to say that the supermarket has been 'inflicted" on the purchasing public, in that their views were not the major consideration when the principle was originally conceived. The most important consideration was efficiency and economy of the trade as a whole felte retail operation, and the retail Retailing'. Ralph •G. Towsey.)

Mechanization has played a major role in reducing the need for staff and streamlining the warehouses and shops in the drive for customers. Some of the main methods are as follows:

Mechanized warehousing: enormous cuts in the number of warehouse workers needed have been made possible over recent years by the introduction of pallets and the forklift truck. At the same time, computers are taking over from manual stock control methods.

Containerization has also greatly simplified the bulk delivery of goods, and now, conveyor-belt systems and turret trucks—more manageable, able to work in narrow gangways and reach higher than the conventional fork-lift-are being introduced.

Many of the retailing companies are constructing huge new warehouses to supply the new 'superstores'. For example, the Woolworth half-a-million sq. ft. distribution centre at Swindon.

Others use the specialized storage and transport firms like Cory Distribution Services, with its seven huge depots, 350 road vehicles and 300 electric trucks.

The trend in mechanized warehousing is certainly not over. Experiments are today being conducted to perfect the automated warehouse, using driverless trucks running on special tracks with all-electronic control.

According to one Financial Times' report in January this year: in the shop and distributive trades '... the pressure for techniques which reduce the need for labour have steadily been mounting'. • Packaging, pricing and SO on are more and more being moved away from shops and into special centralized preparation warehouses. A packaging plant being developed by Hall-Thermotank-International of Dartford, mixes, weighs, packs and cartons products ready for sale.

One company, packaging curtain-track fittings, brought about a massive labour cut when it introduced a new cartoning machine which enabled them to replace 200 workers with two girls.

Use of frozen foods and standardization of portions has greatly simplified handling, enabling many more products to be prepared and packaged by machine.

Tescos have already introduced automatic reel - fed vacuum machines for automated cheese and bacon packaging.

'The need for skilled labour has been centralized and reduced,' said a 'Financial Times' report on the system. • Use of tail-lift lorries cuts the need for manhandling packages from the transport into the shop. Sainsburys claim to have cut unloading time from one hour to 20 minutes per visit in this way. • Some firms use a form of roll-on, roll-off system of trolleys on which goods are packed at the warehouse and are wheeled by one man from the lorry into the store and then can be used in the shop by the shelf fillers as mobile containers.

FA FA!» PETROL ESTe CIS PAY STEVENACE NOT WAGE CuiS LAST PAY RISE 1956! • Mobile shelving Vertical sections of rotating shelves already in use in some European and American shops are being introduced in Britain.

A Swiss department store is said to have increased turnover in its footwear department by 6u per cent, while reducing staff by half when using them. • Electronic ordering systems.

Mac-Fisheries and Sainsburys' supermarkets have both begun trials of an electronic device designed • to speed up re-ordering and to cut overstocking.

It is a portable data recorder with which the manager or assistant records on tape the stock position of every line in the shop. He passes along the shelves noting which stocks are low, and presses buttons on the gadget to record the code of the item.

Lines that are held in the shop's own stockroom are cancelled off the tape by more pressing of buttons and the final record is then fed into the shop's data transmission module. This sends the total out-of-stock position via ordinary telephone lines to the company's computer.

Using this system, MacFisheries expects to reduce its backroom stock by as much as 80 per cent. The firm also estimates that the time between order entry and the production of purchase orders will be cut from 48 to six hours.

Although new to Britain, the gadget is used by more than 8,000 supermarkets in the USA and has been adopted LONDON! 'D DIVISION UN O1 OF SHOP DIST 15U ALLIED VC.. also by the Belgian chain Grand Bazaar. • The Electronic Cash ter.

The portable ordering system described above is a step towards the automated checkout on which much research is being conducted in the USA.

An even greater advance towards this is the electronic cash register which is virtually a computer terminal at the check-out point.

With this system every sale item in the shop has a printed bar tag giving all its details, including price.

The check-out assistant passes a light-pen (a photosensitive scanner) attached to the cash register over the tag. The price is thus recorded and also the fact that stock has been reduced by that item.

The cash register, as well as automatically supplying the customer's bill also supplies a tape record of stock which can be fed to the computer in the same way as with the portable recorder.

Pitney-Bowes and other companies are already manufacturing 100,000 electronic registers a year in the USA. United States' Woolworths are using the system. In Britain, Sainsburys and the John Lewis Partnership are planning trials.

Among other advantages, it is expected to speed-up customer passage time through the checkout point, enabling a cut in the number of cashiers on this work. • Computers Stock control, accounting and control of tran sport fleets are three wholesale-retail activities which the major companies pass on to their computer departments.

The firms making calculators and computer equipment are expecting a bonanza with the introduction of VAT and are gearing-up their advertising and production in anticipaThe use of closed-circuit television 'eyes' , two-way mirrors, and systems of ordinary mirrors to watch for goods being stolen and to monitor staff at work.

The well-stocked supermarket represents the poorest paid. Many pensioners are faced with the terrible situation of being given the sight of all they require to maintain a reasonable standard of living and yet only being able to take away the most miserable amounts of goods of the lowest quality, which is all they can afford Capitalism has no interest in the welfare of customers, only in their ability to pay. The Courts are used to dealing harshly with anyone who breaks the rules.

For the shop employees, capitalism sees new technology not as a means of assisting the work, but as a way of divesting them of their jobs entirely. For those who must still be employed, the speed and intensity of operation is raised.

Increasingly throughout the distribution industry, the system is one of production-line working for casual-labour wages.

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