A Supermarket Customer and their Anxiety

I previously wrote A Cafe Customer and their Anxiety and it occured to me while writing it that it also applies to supermarkets and other brick and mortar retailers.

Sometimes we're just after something and it would be great to know if the shop has it in stock, before deciding to invest our time on a journey.

It's generally not feasible to phone a local supermarket but they could have a realtime stock check for products online - or even in-store - oh look they're out of Avocardo's, a quick QR code scan and I can see they have some out the back, I'll press the 'request refill' button to notify a member of staff to refill the shelf so I can pick a couple.

A supermarket might argue that by having this and not having a product in stock they might lose the opportunity to sell other items. I would argue that this short-term thinking usually hurts long-term. In the long term this helpful behaviour would encourage more loyalty as they're thinking about the customer's needs over their own, saving their customers (us) time and money.

Supermarkets have ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems like SAP and integrating them with real-time APIs is possible, i've done it.