Lucky for pets – the pet products and services industry seems to be not only recession-proof, but thriving. The industry has grown every year since 1994 by at least $1 billion; and in 2017, total revenue of U.S. pet stores reached $19.29 billion. Americans love their pets and are willing to spend lots of cold hard cash on them.
And while Petco is growing, so is most of the competition, which includes mass pet-product retailers, pet specialty boutiques, grocery stores and of course, online retailers that deliver items right to the customer’s front door. The rise of e-commerce, shrinking margins and climbing labor costs have made the pet business increasingly competitive.
Overall, the pet service market is growing steadily, but it’s still more challenging than ever to draw customers into brick-and-mortar stores. To combat this, savvy retailers are turning to innovative retail technology to drive both growth and efficiency, improve the customer experience, reduce costs, and improve bottom-line results. And Petco is no different.
Whether it’s in your first Petco location in the San Diego area or your flagship in-store veterinary hospital in Aldine, Texas, investing in intelligent retail technology that drives efficiencies, protects profits or enhances the customer experience can help your business thrive.
Petco has an impressive growth strategy. Today, you have 1,500-plus Petco and Unleased by Petco locations across the United States, Mexico and Puerto Rico. But this growth doesn’t just come in form of new products – it’s through services such as on-site dog training, do-it-yourself dog washes, and recently even full-service veterinary care that’s available 7 days a week. By delving deeper into pet medical care, you endeavor to become the one-stop shop for all of a pet owner’s needs.
But, growth also requires attracting new shoppers/pet parents and converting them into loyal customers – and this isn’t always easy.
Today’s consumer not only wants – but demands – unique in-store experiences and personalized service. To bring his or her dog into the store for spa services or to get a recommendation on the best holistic, grain-free pet food for a sensitive tummy. If you won’t provide these unique services and products, your competitor will. And implementing innovative retail technology in-store would enable Petco to offer an improved customer experience that could lead to increased customer loyalty and growth.
But retail technology comes in many forms of course. It’s not just the flashy in-store displays, beacons or biometrics that can help drive a better customer experience.
It’s also the technology that sits in the back office, behind the counter, or even in your head office. It’s the technology that helps you streamline processes, drive efficiency and automate manual processes. Because, it’s these innovations that free up your Petco managers and cashiers, and allow them to spend more time on the shop floor, driving sales and providing a better customer experience for pets and their owners alike.
With the help of Tellermate’s cash management technology at the point of sale (POS), Petco can drive efficiency and provide a better customer experience – not to mention driving adherence to process across your growing portfolio of stores, reducing shrink and cutting labor costs. All this equates to saving money and increasing revenues.
How? Through LiveDrawer®, the intelligent cash drawer that builds Tellermate’s count-by-weight technology into the drawer itself, giving you full visibility of exactly how much money is in the drawer at any one time.
LiveDrawer can help Petco simplify the traditional cash management process by automating manual cash management tasks such as reconciling tills or preparing banking deposits. With its transaction-by-transaction reporting, you can get a full audit trail of each and every transaction even when multiple operators share the same cash drawer. Not only does this allow you to pinpoint the perpetrators of cash loss, but it also eliminates the need for staff to leave the floor early to reconcile money drawers during shift changeovers. Instead, your sales assistants can stay on the shop floor, generating sales and interacting with customers, right until the very last moment.
Plus, with real-time alerts and pre-set thresholds your managers can proactively manage change levels and lifts & skims to ensure tills aren’t taken offline during their busiest times.
What’s more, LiveDrawer® Manager provides in-store and remote (read head-office) visibility of the drawer’s contents in real-time at all times. Which could help Petco in numerous ways…
Shrink costs global retailers a whopping $123.4 billion each year. According to the 2016 Global Retail Theft Barometer, this represents 1.23% of retail sales. More worrisome, employee theft now makes up a large portion of this shrink – even more than shoplifting. And when it comes to internal theft, most incidents occur at the POS. Think about the opportunity that cash in plain sight can bring to a dishonest employee.
It’s no wonder then that preventing loss is usually high on the priority list of most retailers, and Petco is no exception. Since you deal with large amounts of cash and are hiring new employees to staff your stores, loss prevention measures are likely on your mind.
LiveDrawer provides real-time cash counting, giving full visibility of the number of bills and coins in the drawer ‒ from anywhere. It knows exactly how much cash goes in a drawer – down to the very last penny ‒ not just how much the POS thinks there should be. LiveDrawer is so smart that it sends an immediate alert when a process is not followed or when an overage or shortage occurs. To sum it up, it makes stealing at the POS almost impossible.
But perhaps cash loss isn’t intentional? What then? Well, LiveDrawer also pinpoints which cashiers consistently make mistakes; and sends alerts when processes are not followed. From here, you can identify the staff or stores that could benefit from retraining.
Plus, the ability to view the contents of each drawer in real-time also allows managers and corporate offices to reduce the vulnerability of cash in the tills – firing alerts when lifts and skims are needed. Less cash on the shop floor means less opportunity for theft.
In fact, a large, multi-store retailer in the UK tested LiveDrawer during a six-week pilot at one of its problematic stores where employee theft was rampant. Prior to LiveDrawer implementation, the retailer’s cash handling process consisted of managers placing uncounted cash in a safe and waiting for a third-party vendor to pick up and count it every two weeks. Once Tellermate’s intelligent cash drawers were placed in the problem store, the theft completely stopped because staff knew it provided visibility for each and every transaction.
And when LiveDrawer is used in combination with an intelligent safe at the POS, notes can be checked for counterfeits and securely stored until the end of day or when the safe is full. It’s a nimble but powerful alternative to bulky and often expensive cash recyclers.
All this means that cash loss can increase security, reduce shrink and provide greater profitability.
For almost 40 years, Tellermate has partnered with businesses similar to Petco to help lower operating costs, reduce shrink, drive efficiency and growth, and gain better visibility of their cash. Our intelligent cash management solutions help leading companies, including Michael’s, T-Mobile and Aldi. How? By helping them reduce the amount of time spent investigating cash loss and discrepancies, reconciling cash drawers, setting floats or counting deposits. Which gives them more time to spend with customers.
Tellermate is confident that we could help Petco drive efficiency, reduce shrink and gain better visibility of the cash across your stores – all of which enables you to optimize your ongoing growth strategy.
We’re so confident, in fact, that we’d like to offer a free pilot of our LiveDrawer solution in your stores ‒ allowing you to experience the benefits first-hand and measure the potential ROI.
