If you’ve been shopping at the Food Co-op over the past four weeks, you’ve probably noticed new registers in the store. That is the front end of our new point of sales system, which we officially launched on September 25th! The system also includes a back end, which is a database that keeps a record of every product in stock in the store, every product sold in the store, and even generates lists of suggested products to re-order to keep our shelves filled with all of the varieties of food we all love.
Why has the Food Co-op gone high tech? Simply put, we’ve crossed a threshold. We now sell 1.25 million dollars’ worth of food in a year, and to do so, our staff of nine must regularly place orders through 70 suppliers to keep our shelves filled with 4,000 different kinds of products. This is as much product variety as a typical Trader Joes carries, but because we carry far more locally sourced foods that we have to order directly from our area’s small farms and businesses, we actually place orders through more accounts than our big box competition!
If North Country Food Co-op is to continue to grow and thrive, our staff needs technological assistance to keep track of which products are selling quickly, which are selling slowly, and which products to re-order to keep the store fully stocked. Without it, much of this work must be done from memory, and with 4,000 different types of products to keep track of, the risk of mis-ordering or over-working is great.
In early 2015, we plan on implementing our 40th Anniversary Renovation Project, which will furnish the store with new shelving and a new and bigger produce cooler, freezer and walk-in cooler, among other things. To get the most out of our collective investment, we want to be careful to fill these coolers, freezers and shelves with a mix of products that we know are in high demand by our members and shoppers. The best way to ensure this, and to ensure smart growth in general, is with the increased knowledge and ordering assistance provided by a point of sales system. This is why we’re calling the launch of our point of sales system the cornerstone of our 40th Anniversary Renovation Project.
We understand that, with the launch of our new point of sales system registers, there have been delays in the checkout process. We greatly appreciate your patience as we fine tune this system and make sure that everything is scanning and flowing smoothly. In the coming weeks and months, as we work out these kinks and switch over to new scanner scales that integrate with our new registers, the checkout process will actually become faster and more efficient than it was under our old set up. All in all, we believe the benefits to be had from switching to this system will far outweigh the growing pains we had to go through to launch it.
Sincerely,
North Country Food Co-op’s Board of Directors