Where are all the popular products?

In many cases, a retailer can be judged on how well it stocks and displays popular items at the worst possible times. Over and over again, the many Wal-Mart Supercenters in my area become a showplace for consumer madness every single Sunday afternoon when I visit them for the purpose of observing customer behavior.

There is something that never fails when I take some of the more popular items included in the large grocery coupon circular included in the local Sunday newspaper and try to find those products in stock on a Sunday afternoon at a few local Supercenters. What never fails, you may ask? My inability to purchase those products, that's what.

Staples like Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Dannon Yogurt and even Land O' Lakes butter were a few examples from a recent Sunday coupon circular that I found in short supply at no less than two local Supercenters. In one instance, several popular Dannon Yogurt products were completely out of stock on a Sunday afternoon at a local Supercenter. For a global retailer - -the world's largest -- with a reported tight grip on the IT systems that keep products on shelves at all times, this was surprising to find.

In a CIO article from more than five years ago, Wal-Mart's IT systems are said to rival those of any retailer. It's now 2008, and these systems can't keep inventory at a respectable level on a day when more customers are shopping? At least, that's my observation. Sunday beats every business day of the week, although Saturday can be a little frantic inside your local Wal-Mart as well.

I have what I need -- now, let's check out quickly and efficiently

The above statement sounds like a best-case scenario, and it usually is at many retailers. However, most retailers don't have near the traffic of a standard, run-of-the-mill Wal-Mart Supercenter, either. Although self-checkout systems have made appearances in all the local Supercenters I have access to, the balancing of them with human-powered checkout lines leaves a lot to be desired.

For example, two Wal-Mart Supercenters each had six self-checkout lanes from a local observation trip. Yes, I visited on a Sunday to really get a feel for Wal-Mart's checkout traffic levels and how the "checkout flow" would perform under heavy strain. What I found was that the self-checkout lanes were always backed up (all six lanes) with multiple customers. Meanwhile, most of the cashier-stocked checkout stations were full as well. At the same time, the majority of cashier-stocked checkout stations were not open for business.

Wal-Mart, it's time to leap ahead of the competition and so something innovative here. Something like this: have configurable checkout stations that can be converted within a few seconds from human-powered checkout stations to self-checkout stations. Your in-a-hurry customers would love you for it and you'd get more customers out the door sooner and with larger smiles on their faces. That is, unless you have customers who love waiting in line. Unless there are 48-hour days on sale in the seasonal department, nobody likes waiting, right?

Be any innovator instead of a status-quo'er

These are two areas that Wal-Mart really could improve to ensure it's serving customers as efficiently as possible without wasting that precious time. Although many do not realize it, time is money. Time is also the most important daily resource for many of us. The more we see wasted, the angrier we get. Wal-Mart may have a large portion of the U.S. population rounded up as regular customers, but are they happy when they leave the store? How does anyone know?

Unfortunately, it's common to see these areas any Sunday when I visit Wal-Mart locations. Low prices are one thing, but combine them with superior "customer processing" (as I would call it), and there's a recipe for delighting customers. Right now, the process is far from using that word as a description.

Stay tuned next week right here at BloggingStocks for another edition of The Wal-Mart Weekly. Until then, have a splendid day.