RSS 2.0 FeedAugust 19, 2011, Bellmore Life
Stop & Shop: relating to the community
North Bellmore's Stop and Shop prides itself on community relations.
In a marketplace in which competitive pricing reigns to draw in customers, supermarkets also reach into the community in an effort at community relations to gain market share – or at least more customers.
North Bellmore’s Stop & Shop at the corner of Newbridge Road and Jerusalem Avenue is a case-in-point: It reaches into the community to better the lives of local residents as it increases market share.
With 2,600 customers strong, Stop & Shop has for several years held events around the neighborhood and in front of its store, such as raising funds for neighborhood children with serious illnesses – specifically raising monies for a child receiving treatment at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital.
The supermarket has also sponsored Earth Day events for Girl Scouts in local elementary schools, and has gone to local schools at Easter, bringing eggs for the children to color. Stop & Shop also brought gift bags for the children during Easter.
Christmas is a particularly busy time for the supermarket, as it opens its freezers to provide turkeys to needy families during the holiday.
Store manager Bruce Detzel spoke with this newspaper about the community work the store does for the residents and its customers.
“We’re a people-friendly store,” Mr Detzel remarked. “We work at creating good relationships with our customers” because “we’re here in the neighborhood.”
Mr. Detzel admits he enjoys the North Bellmore neighborhood, even if he lives in another area of Long Island. “I love this particular store,” he said. He said that customers always approach him looking for items not stocked or listed, and “we follow through with their requests.”
But he also said that while the store can fulfill the requests of its customers a majority of the time, “I explain to them what we can offer them, and also what we can’t offer them.”
The store has increased its organic and natural products, for example, but, as this reporter experienced when shopping there, the products are placed randomly in their respective product categories, and not on a shelf displaying organic products.
One employee, however, when asked if the store has an organic section – or natural section – pointed out a shelf near the produce department lined with organic and natural packaged products.
The store has its own brand of all-natural poultry that contains no additives or growth hormones, and it sells other brands of all-natural poultry as well.
Among its more popular customer-oriented programs involves handheld scanning devices customers with Stop & Shop cards can use that automatically discount items purchased at the store.
“This store has the highest percentage of individual scan usage of any store we have on Long Island,’ said Mr. Detzel. It’s all about the technology, he added.
It was easy to understand that claim. Upon entering into the store, on the right side is a wall holding 40 handheld scan devices. A shopper simply scans the Stop & Shop discount card under a reader, which then highlights a scanner the shopper can take to shop.
As the customer shops, putting items in the basket, the bar code is scanned and the discounted price comes up on the display on the scanner.
What about produce and fruit? When this newspaper wanted to scan the price of cherries, which were priced lower than a nearby competitor, the scanner would not read the bar code. What to do? we thought.
With one produce employee in the area busy, we asked a shopper, who wished to remain anonymous, how to scan the fruit. She told us that it needs to be weighed, and a price tag printed. The price tag would contain the average cost per pound, and also the discounted price per pound for the handheld scanner.
We weighed it and a price tag printed out with two prices. We scanned in the discounted price and it was entered onto the screen.
“I use the handheld scanner all the time, and I love it,” the customer told this newspaper.
Once at the checkout counter, the prices on the scanner are entered into the cash register digitally within seconds by the attendant.
Another popular program is its gas discount program, in which the shopper, once accumulating 200 or more points on their discount card, can buy gas at a Shell gas station for 80 cents a gallon.
Perhaps most convincing about Stop & Shop’s commitment to the community, and its penchant for reaching into it, is that it has hired upwards of 30 new employees over the last six months, said Mr. Detzel.
That’s new opportunities for local outreach – and that’s growth.
