Localism alert: While shopping at the downtown Chicago Macy’s the other week, I noticed a small line of customers queued up in a corner of the store. The line led not to a counter and a salesperson but to an automated kiosk for a skin care product.
Maybe I’m not the most dedicated shopper, but I had never seen anything resembling a large vending machine in a top-end retail store before. I was curious, so I came back to Macy’s a few days later to take another look. Same line – if anything, it was longer. Ladies and men were feeding credit cards into the machine – more like an automated booth – and watching branded video displays on skin care as the machine dispensed packages of product.
With no salesperson, and (apparently) no Macy’s stock-keeping requirements, plus a modest space requirement in a off-center location in the store, I imagined the net revenue dollars per square foot on this approximately 3×8′ kiosk was a pretty impressive number — even more so when compared to what stood there before: effectively nothing.
The product was for Proactiv. You can find these kiosks around the country here.
What also struck me about the machine was how little it clashed visually and experience-wise with the surrounding sales floor. Situated at the edge of the cosmetics section, the kiosk’s video display and favorable lighting reflected the kinds of tones you expect from a cosmetics counter. The fit was excellent.
But still: a vending machine? In a top-end store? It nagged at me for an explanation.
In the end, I thought what I was seeing was in part explained by the nature of the product. Because Proactiv is aimed at skin problems, maybe, I thought, the kiosk afforded shoppers a kind of privacy.
And that’s what I imagined until I saw this today: luxury menswear kiosks.
Quattro Clothiers, a Toronto-based luxury menswear shop, is using an automated retail kiosk by Signifi to dispense designer Italian shirts, according to a news release.
The SpotShop kiosk uses a tray system to carefully handle the shirts, which carry price tags ranging from $225 to $395. The solution can be custom designed to each brand and features a digital display screen to promote the products. Quattro intends to use the machines to drive traffic back to their brick-and-mortar store by placing units within a three-to-four-mile radius, according to the release.
Well, there goes the idea that privacy alone drives kiosk sales. There’s nothing sensitive about designer Italian shirts.
Wayne Grohl, the source.com.
