Some recent work has me thinking more about planograms and their effectiveness, particularly in grocery stores.  The pretty much universal grocery store setup has the outside walls ringed with refrigeration units and stocked with all the refrigerated and frozen foods.  The milk and eggs are in the back, the fresh produce on one side, the frozen foods on the other side with bread somewhere in the middle, towards the back.  This layout works for a couple of reasons. It allows the electrical requirements for the refrigerated units to all be on the outer ring of the store.  More importantly, it forces you and I to walk all over the store to buy staple items.  The thought is along the way we will see enough other stuff that the number of items in our basket will increase beyond what we originally came into purchase.  All of these reasons are beneficial to the retailer, not the consumer. 

With grocery margins being razor thin and competition fierce, there is an opportunity for a grocer to try something radical in an effort to obtain market share.  Make it about the consumer!  Make it easier to get in and get out with the things we need.  Rearrange your shelves based on how our brains work; do it based on the meals of the day.  For example, take breakfast.  There are core items that everyone eats for breakfast.  Milk, cereal, orange juice, oatmeal, yogurt, coffee, waffles, pancakes, syrup, sausage and bacon.  Why not group all of these items together in the store?  I know my brain easily groups foods by the meals I eat, not by what is on aisle 12 in the store.  I know this could create issues with how to place the refrigeration units, but it isn't rocket science.  With all of the market basket data available today, the above list of items could easily grow ten-fold and could also be tailored to include what shoppers at particular stores purchase together.  Some will say this will eliminate the chance to pick up the unintended purchases that the current Tour De Store setup creates.  I disagree and think the number of items purchased may actually increase since the likelihood of forgetting an item will be decreased.  How many of us have returned home missing the key part of a cookout menu because the mustard, ground beef, buns, chips and pickles are all on different aisles?

The best websites are successful because things are easy to find and then easy to purchase in a short amount of time.  Isn't it time these best practices are applied to the brick and mortar locations?