Costcutter Culverstone Green is a family run business that has served its semi-rural
community and passers-by for over fifteen years in its current location.
To remain competitive with the nearest stores, the 2,600 ft store consistently offers price
matched goods and promotional items, alongside its integrated post office and off licence.
Peter Juty, the store owner, states, "The nearest supermarket to our Costcutter store is
located only ten miles away, so it is important to remain competitive. Costcutter price
matches their goods so that we can provide our customers with the good quality items
they need at competitive prices."
To ensure consistency in their price matching, Costcutter sends a weekly update to its
stores with the number of products that require price changes. Typically, this results in
between 30-100 price changes, which could take one staff member a full morning to
update when using paper labels. In addition, Costcutter releases promotions on a threeweekly basis. This covers between 200-300 items, taking up to three members of staff up
to two days to complete.
"It's time-consuming and even when you think you have every label, you always miss a
few," says Juty. "Such errors would result in our customers becoming increasingly upset
and losing confidence in our store. For example, if we had promoted an item at £1.50 on
the shop floor but the till charged £2, the customer would think we were trying to rip them
off. However, this was often because the promotions had finished and the product was
back to its normal price but the shelf label had not been updated."
"My customers are getting used to a new
way of shopping"
To mitigate the loss of customer confidence, the store was committed to reducing the
number of discrepancies between the shop floor paper labels and the till price. In some
cases, this resulted in products being sold for under the recommended retail price.
Juty comments, "This was especially a problem during COVID 19 when we simply didn't
have the time and the manpower to be changing the price labels. At one point, this
resulted in 850 items being sold for less than the recommended retail price. In this
aspect, we lost a lot of margin during this time period".
An automatic solution
Peter Juty decided that a beneficial solution to the store's paper labelling system was the
implementation of an Electronic Shelf Labelling solution (ESL).The ESL solution links into
Costcutter's Culverstones core price management system and is centrally controlled via a
computer in the store. From the price management system, designated users can update
the price of individual products. Then, the system will automatically replicate this update
by changing the electronic shelf label for the product on the shop floor.
