Beating the Bust: The Profit Enhancing Importance of the UK Point Of Sale

It’s no news, by now, that the UK has entered its biggest financial slump in almost 50 years. Retail businesses have been hit with particular savagery, losing impulse sales in great unhealthy chunks as customers cut back on everything other than the necessities. Impulse sales have always been a big earner for British businesses (think sweet stands at supermarket checkouts, or gift racks by a book shop till). The UK point of sale, in other words, represents a key tactic for shop owners who want to beat the bust. So how can they use them to their advantage?

The trick, with impulse sales, has always been to display something small and attractive to a customer. An item they might not need, but, in that all-important moment when they have wallet out and are ready to spend, that they feel they don’t want to do without. That’s been fine through all the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s – but now the appropriately-named Noughties have come and gone and left the nation with nothing, the tactic has changed. The UK point of sale is embracing the idea that people no longer have the money to buy stuff that looks pretty but isn’t necessary, by offering, instead, either little essentials or what might be called “depression busters”.

A depression buster is any item that doesn’t have an intrinsic place on a shopping list – i.e., it isn’t classed as a necessity – but has a value of its own, in terms of making people feel happier. There are all sorts of depression busting items that can be displayed at the UK point of sale: inexpensive makeup, for example, in a clothes store. Inexpensive makeup is a fantastic point of sale item for a depressed economic environment: if people can doll themselves up at low cost, they’ll feel better about themselves without worrying about the money they just spent.

“Inexpensive” is the key word here. It always has been, to an extent: the UK point of sale has always worked by offering customers who are already going to pay the chance to add an extra five or ten pounds to their bill. What businesses are starting to realise is that an extra five or ten pounds is way too much. The items offered at point of sale have changed, now putting an extra two or three pounds, tops, onto the full price of the customer’s shop – an amount that takes into account the radically diminished available spending money in most pockets.

That’s the way for the UK point of sale to get carry on making money for the stores that rely on it: to continue adding figures to the daily take of a shop. People like spending money, even (and sometimes especially) when they don’t have much of it: the trick of point of sale display is to encourage them to spend an amount they don’t feel guilty about. If they can be enticed into buying something “for themselves” (that depression buster we talked about earlier), they’ll walk out of the shop happier: and the daily figures will start looking pretty cheerful, too.