When designing a store atmosphere, a lot is taken into consideration: lighting, music, layout, cleanliness, and noise levels.  Playing a certain type of music at a certain level has proven to encourage customers to linger in the store and potentially purchase more products. Having a clean and organized location also creates a calm and enjoyable atmosphere for customers as they are shopping. 
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One thing that store owners may not think about at first is the noise level of a shopping cart.  Whether it is when the cart is rolling through the different departments throughout the store, running into a display, or going through the check out shopping carts tend to make some noise.  The image on the left illustrates the decibel levels of metal carts versus Bemis carts through a shopping experience. For reference 55 dBS, decibels, is the equivalent to a portable air conditioner running.  This may not seem very loud, but imagine you have 30 portable air conditioners around you while you are shopping.
 
​In a sound and consumer buying behavior study published by C.E Nell and Michael Cant, their findings of how store atmospherics play into buying behavior show that: “The participants in both the focus group interviews and naïve sketches explained that any unpleasant atmospheric element detected in the store, whether it was too loud or too dark, had a direct influence on the amount of time that they spent browsing in the store, which ultimately influenced the likelihood of purchasing something, most probably in a negative way.” (2013) 
 
When it comes to creating a luxury atmosphere for your store, it starts with the noise level.  As demonstrated in the study, consumers were directly impacted by the store if it was too loud or too dark.  Making the simple change from metal shopping carts to Bemis Shopping Carts is a simple way to ensure a quiet atmosphere for your customers.

The ​Bemis Retail Solutions polymer shopping cart is durable as well as environmentally friendly. The polymer design lends itself to avoid many of the obstacles traditional metal carts face; costly repairs and more frequent replacements being the most common.

When creating this cart, it was important to Bemis to make a well-designed product in a conscientious way. The innovative use of a durable polymer shopping cart instead of a traditional metal cart, and the modular design both lowers maintenance costs as well as improves the environmental footprint. 

In an environmental impact study by BASF, it was concluded that Bemis Retail Solutions shopping carts use 30% less energy and 30% fewer resources over its full life cycle than metal carts. The visual to the left shows that the Bemis shopping cart lowers greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 40%, water usage by over 50% and solid waste generation by 50%. 
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When the polymer shopping carts are being produced, there tends to be left over pieces left over from the induction process. Instead of throwing away those pieces, they are sent through the regrind process to be ground down into more pellets to make more shopping carts. This prevents having to use brand new material and the extra shipping and waste that is associated with that.

Not only are Bemis shopping carts sustainably produced, but these carts also have a modular design that saves our customers money and reduces the number of full carts that need to be replaced.  Often when a metal shopping cart handle or wheel is damaged, the entire shipping cart is out of commission, but our shopping carts can just have that specific piece replaced in the field.

​​Bemis shopping carts encompass a modular design that allows for easy replacements to be made and allows the ability to save material since the entire cart does not need to be replaced. That feature paired with the sustainable production makes these carts all around eco-friendly. 
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What if your carts could tell you how long someone shopped? At Bemis, we are frequently asked what the appropriate cart size mixture should be for a store: With our CartTrac solution, you can tailor your fleet to exactly match what your customers prefer to shop with. The picture below is a report screenshot from a Bemis CartTrac test site. Not only does this tell you how long someone shopped – you can see what size of cart they chose to shop with. At this store, customers actually spent more time shopping with a smaller sized cart than they did with a large one. 

Pre-COVID, many stores were shifting towards more food service and inside-the-store dining options. Stores that featured multiple points of sale like this don’t capture the total customer value by focusing on the basket size at checkout: What if they bought a coffee? Juice? Maybe a slice of pizza while they shopped? The more time they spend in the store, the more they are exposed too these options – sales that don’t show up at the register.

We’ll eventually return to some semblance of in-store dining nationwide but until we get there, shopping time in your stores during COVID is important for a whole different reason: We want to reduce loitering and browsing and make sure customers are getting in and out quickly. Our CartTrac solution can help with this as well.
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The dashboard of the tracking software can show you an active number of carts inside a store and a median time for how long they’ve been in there. You can even take this a step further and setup indoor zones for certain areas of your store to get a detailed picture of the customer journey inside your store. Stay tuned for our next blog article that will feature some results from one of our customer journey tracking sites.