ReThink Productivity Podcast
In this exciting podcast, Simon Hedaux from ReThink Productivity shares his insights and strategies for improving productivity and efficiency in the retail and hospitality industries. With the help of clients, partners, and the ReThink team, Simon covers everything from measuring and tracking productivity to developing and implementing effective strategies.
Whether you're a business owner, manager, or employee, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone who wants to learn how to get more done and improve their bottom line.
Here's what you can expect to learn:
- How to measure and track productivity
- Proven strategies for improving efficiency and reducing waste
- How to create a culture of productivity and innovation
- Tips for motivating and engaging your team
- Real-world examples of how other businesses have used ReThink Productivity to achieve success
Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from the experts and get ahead of the curve with your own business.
ReThink Productivity Podcast
Key Retail Trends 2025
Sue and Simon explore key retail trends reshaping operations: loyalty-based deep discounts, data-driven opening hours optimization, and the challenges of tech fragmentation for managers. Each trend reveals how retailers are balancing cost pressures with customer experience in an increasingly complex operational landscape.
• Loyalty programs now offering "deep cuts" exclusively to members rather than broad price reductions
• Promotional displays featuring loyalty prices create inventory management challenges when offers end
• Data science and AI replacing gut-feel decisions about when to open and close
• Managers struggling with fragmented technology, often needing to access five different systems for daily KPIs
Join us for our 10th Productivity Forum on 11th September at Birmingham International Conference Centre. With over 150 registered attendees, innovation showcases, speakers, panels, and networking opportunities, it promises to be our biggest and best event yet.
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Welcome to the Productivity Podcast. I am joined by probably our most frequent guest, susan. Hi Susan.
Speaker 2:Hello.
Speaker 1:We've done the book. So every chapter AI's had a go at reviewing it as well. So you can listen to that in the podcast and all the usual places you get your podcasts chapters one to 11, and then a bit of a pre and a post review, the two notebook lm versions, which give I a chance, ai a chance, to read it and digest it and summarize it. So quite interesting. But so you've been doing lots of presentations back to clients over the the last couple of months and wanted to touch on two or three key themes that you've been seeing. So do you want to take us through?
Speaker 2:yes, it's from presentations and just being out and about generally. So I guess one thing I've noticed is the difference. It's a customer offer difference where there's much more of a shift to deep cuts based on loyalty.
Speaker 1:So it's you know, you get next point deep cuts as in price cuts, yeah um, so you know whether it's sainsbury's tesco's.
Speaker 2:The co-ops are now doing it based on club card. So rather than kind of a broad price reductions for everybody, if you're part of the loyalty it gets a kind of an enhanced loyalty but silly question who isn't part of the loyalty?
Speaker 1:because if I see something at six quid and it's three quid next to offer or club card, I'm like not paying six quid. Does anybody pay full price?
Speaker 2:some will do and yeah I'm amazed by that.
Speaker 1:Well, I don't know logic of I get. People might want to give data, which is ultimately what you you're giving and your shopping habits and trends.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I'd be signing up all day long and I guess that's the trade-off You're selling your data for the privilege of getting some lower prices. But I think it's interesting what it means in terms of volumes. So promotional workload, so mounting work, mounting displays. But even dealing with the volumes of stock as they come in is making a difference. So I think there must be some quite big shifts in volumes and some of the lines that suddenly have a deep cut that people will will buy but I suppose it just dawned on me in this conversation now how does that stack up from a?
Speaker 1:so I know the law about was now prices and stuff has to be at a higher price for a certain amount of days across a certain number of locations to establish the price yes but is this a not a way of circumventing, because I don't think there's any laws about it, but is this a way of suggesting that the cut is significant, as in the non-loyalty price I can put up to a much higher rate, knowing that not many people are going to buy it, and if they do, they're paying a massive premium. But show us being a loyal customer in the loyalty program. It's a much deeper cut. So they I'll make it up the lego lambs 20 quid by actually price it 30 quid, but then say net to price club card price, co-op rewards price, so we don't alienate anybody. Individually it's 12 quid, so it looks like I'm saving 18 quid when it was maybe never 30 quid in a pre. I don't know how they yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know, I would think you have the same price establishing rules, but I don't know, but you can establish whatever price you want, is my point.
Speaker 1:So you could just make it look more expensive, to show a deeper cut. You could. The question is how real is it?
Speaker 2:yeah, from what I've seen some of the prices look you know they are big cuts, so whether they're, they appear to be big cuts, whether in real life they are.
Speaker 1:And so, if that's the case, then, and everybody's gone down this trend, because there was a trend of price matching Aldi and Lidl, which people kind of still do, but on less and less lines yeah, two alarms. Why haven't Aldi and Lidl done it?
Speaker 2:They don't have the loyalty schemes, the same way do they.
Speaker 1:So is the future, then, that the next generation of yeah, I guess there's always trends, isn't there?
Speaker 2:and things swing around and move and there's people kind of when it's, when it's a differential, and then once everybody starts doing it, then the innovators move on to something different or go back to the future yes, so this is just something that I've seen. I think it's quite a marked shift from where it was even kind of 12, 18 months ago okay, so loyalty to drive atv, so sell more to the same people.
Speaker 1:That might be a bit tricky because actually you're lowering your price to those people so you could impact your atv negatively if you're not careful.
Speaker 2:So it's a volume play, right yeah, and that that's the thing that I strikes me from an operational point of view. You might have lines that normally you don't sell a huge amount of that. Suddenly you get a load of it for a promotion. So either you, if you don't sell a huge amount of that, suddenly you get a load of it for a promotion. So either you, if you don't put a load in, you run out because it's a good offer. But equally there's that risk that you then end up left as an operator with stock that normally you don't sell that much of but you had to have a load off. So I think it throws up some interesting operational issues beyond. Kind of. You know, if it's your normal high volume stuff that you, you know, you put an offer on, it really doesn't make that much difference. Something involves go up a little bit, but you can always manage it. It's the fact if you've got lines you don't sell a lot of, you get a load of it. Do you clear it?
Speaker 1:but I think an interesting thing again for those listening have a look when you're shopping the supermarket.
Speaker 1:There's lots of fsd use freestanding display unit shippers, which clearly are sponsored by yeah the agio, whoever it might be, they're the people that typically send all the spirits in. But on those shippers, in all of the brands, supermarkets the main one they've got the loyalty price. So unless you shift that while it's on loyalty price, you've got a problem because all of a sudden you've got some of this price, so they've kind of locked themselves into lots of stuff. What I'm seeing is in all the supermarkets there's lots of those types of things around which maybe you've got too much in or they've bought or got a better rate buying, taking 10 shippers per live store, whatever that they're going to struggle to shift. Then you're left with a dichotomy of got a better rate buying, taking 10 shippers per live store, whatever that they're going to struggle to shift. Then you're left with a dichotomy of how do you keep them on sale because you've got a different price point.
Speaker 2:It's always the operational challenges, isn't it? It's the operators that have to cope with the challenges that the customer offer throws up.
Speaker 1:Agreed, so that's one of the key trends. That's really interesting. What else have you seen?
Speaker 2:another one is um people looking closer at opening hours and I think it directly relates to costs. So people are looking hard again at cost bases, not surprisingly, it's not. I mean it's an ongoing thing, but we've had the um, the national insurance, and then the um. I mean it's an ongoing thing but we've had the national insurance and then the national living wage and things increasing again in April. So there was the announcement that Tesco were looking at Tesco Express stores. I think I notice it. When I'm out and about on high streets at the start and the end of the day You'll see people that aren't open. They're opening slightly later than they were or finishing slightly early. I think some of them are probably making a good call. Others, you think there's a hell of a lot of people about and you're not open yet. Are you missing sales?
Speaker 1:And it's interesting because either competitors or gut feel tend to drive what the opening hours are. I think there's a lot more use of data, data science. So the Solve by AI guys have been on before. They're doing loads of neat work in using historic stuff and future stuff to look at opening hours and how you change those by season by six months, three months, two months, whatever. And you don't want to confuse the customer as well because keep changing your opening hours.
Speaker 1:The amount of studies we do where the store opening hours are different than what I displayed on google as a start point, you need to join that up. But I think using data is interesting, especially in a world where you might be in your labor model on minimum manning. So an investment of an hour is big, but if you can prove the return is great. But also the saving saving of an hour over a number of locations over a period of time is significant as well, because you're not you're not necessarily changing the volume of deliveries or the other stuff. You're condensing it into a shorter opening yeah time and it's a physical saving.
Speaker 1:Clearly, other areas you might have to redeploy the hours. So there's loads of stuff to think about. But it's interesting that people are starting to put data, data science, ai, whichever algorithms you may use or company you partner with the use around it, because in my, in my previous lives, there's not been much, much around it other than competitors opening we need to match it, competitors close we need to do something different, or we think it's busier on a sunday evening so let's stay open an hour later and then nobody ever reviews it.
Speaker 1:Yeah opening hours. Interesting lots to go at yeah what else is on the list?
Speaker 2:um. Third one I'm seeing we're obviously seeing lots more tech going into operations, where that's you know all sorts of things from managing you know rotors and payroll and all those sorts of things and time and attendance. There's a lot of more operational things. So, whether that's systems that you know do automatic temperature checks on your fridges and you know, you name it. There's a lot of more operational things. So whether that's systems that do automatic temperature checks on your fridges and you name it, there's a way to digitize it. So all the things that were paper and checklists are digitized.
Speaker 2:And actually what we're seeing is a situation where managers, between all that operational stuff and then potentially different KPIs coming from those systems, unless the organization has got a smart way of pulling that all together, we've seen managers having to spend quite a bit of time hopping between different systems. So the ideal would be it all comes to a dashboard. You use single sign-on, whatever, so that people can move smoothly between them. But that isn't always the case and we see in places where you know a manager might we're in one place at the moment where, just to get the general performance KPIs that they look at every day, different, five different systems yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then again there's loads of partners we've talked about before Quarso, workjam that bring all that together for various different people. So the tech's out there, yeah, and again in a world where clearly there's been some really horrible things happen to some big organizations around their cybersecurity, I understand that implementing new tech might be something that's not particularly high on the agenda or will take longer because of the due diligence that's going to go into it or the more due diligence checking that's going to go into it diligence checking that's going to go into it, but it's coming and will need to be done based on the cost pressures that people are facing now and will face in the future as other costs go up. You know we're six months away from the next round of national living wage being announced, so there's always something coming yeah there's always something coming and it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I mean I think I think back to my time in customer experience. A big part of that was having a really useful interface that users could get the information that they wanted. And I guess you know when you're one business you think of how do you use my one piece of kit, whereas actually if you're a manager in an operation that's looking at operations across the piece, you don't just want one useful interface for one thing, you want to know actually how do I get the best across all these 10 different things that I've got to look at for different aspects of my business. So I think it's going to be an interesting challenge agreed.
Speaker 1:So shameless plug. To finish, then, our 10th productivity forum is on the 11th of September this year at the Birmingham International Conference Centre. We are going to have to close registration very shortly, at the time of recording, because we're kind of at capacity, so way over 100 people have already registered. We've got innovation lines this year where we've got some really cool tech to show you, some great people to speak to that can help solve some of the real business challenges that we see out there. So something even more exciting than listening to me and Sue on stage. Maybe that's exciting, maybe that's not.
Speaker 1:We've got some great speakers lined up. We've got some great panels, some real case studies and real life stories and, as ever, the ability to network, to ask questions, to meet like-minded individuals from your industry and, I think, even more importantly now, from other industries that you can learn from that. Maybe you can bring something in that they do they've not thought about. So we're busy planning. Ten years in, there's been some good ones. Hopefully this will be the best. Are you looking forward to it soon?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like the fact that every year I think they do get better and we get more and more people at each one and you know, when you see the quality of the conversations that people have, the networks that people build, which is so useful when you you know when you're in that doorway you've got to deal with multiple things to know other people that have perhaps been there, done it thinking the same way it's. I found it a really interesting day yeah, I look forward to it.
Speaker 1:Never have enough time to speak to people, so I'll apologize in advance. Always feel absolutely washed out by the end of it, but proud of how it's grown over the years. So biggest and best yet is is the aspiration. I'm sure those that attend will tell us, um, if we manage to achieve that. So thanks for listening and we'll be back soon bye.
