Duty free – the slightly different Shopping experience
Duty free is a special area. According to the Wiki definition „Duty-free shops (or stores) are retail outlets that are exempt from the payment of certain local or national taxes and duties, on the requirement that the goods sold will be sold to travelers who will take them out of the country.“
Everyone knows this „other“ shopping world from border crossings and ship and air travel, where you bring something nice for the better half after the business trip to make up for the previous absence, or get a nice holiday souvenir for relatives. Some also simply cover their tobacco needs quite low priced outside the EU.
Passengers arriving from abroad especially like to buy local specialities from the region of the airport, e.g. chocolates with the Cologne Cathedral as an imprint or a photo book with Hamburg’s sightseeing highlights.
The staff in the shops often have a lot of time and are available for advising customers; in addition, the shelves are tidied and cleaned several times a day. Every traditional retailer dreams of this luxury in regards to personell. However, several times a day at airports there is the bizarre situation that a large plane with 500 people lands and they all storm into the duty free area to get the best offers. And that’s where it gets exciting.
Because there is no real storage space at the airport and even if there would be, you can’t pick it up so quickly and refill again. So as many popular products as possible are squeezed into the shelves. But since most people are like lemmings, of course many want to have what most people buy, because that must be something special or cheap. So there is also sometimes disappointment and out of stock.
After this rush, the employees clean up, breathe deeply, remove the chaos and refill the shelves. And then again it follows the quiet before the storm, or rather before the next arrival.
It’s clear that in this environment nobody thinks about pushfeeds and shelf management, right?
Wrong! Years ago we successfully tested pushfeeds and dividers with the company Gebr. Heinemann and rolled out the system in the Travel Value Shops of several airports in Europe.
The Gebr. Heinemann shop manager from Hamburg Airport already confirmed the positive sales uplift and the reduced maintenance effort: “Automatic pushfeeds guarantee a constantly attractive shelf appearance, especially when rotation is high”.
Now, however, the special fire protection regulations for Duty free had to be considered. But even this was no obstacle for us, because according to the test report, all our products meet the strict fire protection requirements, as experts confirmed.
Sometimes there are also very simple reasons to test a POS TUNING pushfeed: Imperial Tobacco (in Germany Reemtsma) brought new Davidoff outers into the market, but in upright format and with little depth — the result: the products fell over and the optics were down the drain. Fortunately, we were able to help and supplied our systems for several airports worldwide, so that these products were always standing on the shelves like a One.
But now we have also conquered the sea! Imperial Tobacco has now installed our pushfeeds on the Aida cruise ships for the first time!
We thank our great partner and are very happy!
In this spirit, POS TUNING wishes you a good ride and a good flight!