Argos - The future of retail?
This time our retail tour takes place in London where we’re visiting Argos, recently acquired by the grocer Sainsbury’s. Argos is a retailer with quite an interesting way of doing business.
Argos was firstly known as a catalogue store where customers could select their products from catalogues, pay the products and pick the products from the service counter. Not much has changed since then.
Argos operates 728 stores nationwide in the UK. With a bit above £5 billion in revenue, Argos is a top 5 online retailer in the UK.
Nowadays Argos is operated digitally. The storage and picking processes have developed to run more efficiently, but the main idea is still the same.
Instead of having all the products stocked and piled all over the store, the merchandise is actually backdoor where customer can’t see it.
What customer sees in the store is basically whole lot of nothing. It is just an empty space with few touch screens.
With these touch screens the customers can browse the assortment Argos holds in that specific store.
The promise to get the product is 60 seconds.
Quite fast don’t you think? If the product is unavailable in that specific store, one can order it to be delivered to home or to that store. With a hub and spoke model, Argos can serve the customer a product assortment of 57 000 products (in 2016).
The customer journey in Argos is very smooth. There are no shelves creating claustrophobia, but only the kiosks and the counter where customers can pick up their orders. Once customer has selected and paid their product, the info screen start shows the order status. The order status would be something like “in progress” or “ready”.
All in all Argos is a very interesting player well ahead of its time. It is only until recently other retailers have introduced similar solutions in their picking and click&collect. These solutions often include the use of MFC’s, which are expensive and not easily scalable. Argos on the other hand has had time to test and improve its systems and processes for a while.
