Price Chopper is a chain of 80 24-hr. supermarkets in New England. During the last few years, Price Chopper has applied information technology (IT) very aggressively, particularly to its Point of Sale (POS) operations. This is how it is actually pushing its technology and all its efforts into pulling back their customers in the long run. The following are some of the strategies that Price Chopper Supermarket has done to increase product contact for their grocery items:

1. In 1980s, Price Chopper installed ATMs and Point of Banking (POBs) Terminals at customer service desks throughout the chain and by doing such, it didn't only increase its sales but it also complemented the other services offered at those locations. Eventually, they installed its own network, and a Stratus-based fault-tolerant switch and transaction-processing node resulting in capturing a variety of financial transaction-types and passes them on to the relevant financial institutions.

2. Customers pay transactions in various methods, some by cash, others by cheques or by cards. There is a high variability in terms of the cost per transaction. To simplify matters up and to make it more convenient for all, Price Chopper issues its own frequent shopper card, which performs multiple functions. Payment may be performed using the magnetic stripe on the card to effect an ACH electronic cheque transaction (which involves in-house checking against a stop-list, and is otherwise a bank-guaranteed payment). In addition, the bar-code on the front of the card may be scanned at the cash register to support various frequent buyer programs. The cumulative frequent buyer points are printed at the end of the receipt. Another interesting feature of POS operation at Price Chopper stores is that the cash back option is restricted to $30 more than the amount of the purchase. The company prefers to attract customers to the centrally-located ATM, even though that means moving the excess cash a greater distance than would be necessary if balancing of the supply and demand for cash were to be achieved among nearby cash registers.

3. Currently, Price Chopper Supermarket has implemented the Self-Service Checkout system of shopping, the first ever to be done. The procedure involves a series of stations at which customers:

? scan the bar-codes of each of the products they wish to purchase;
? place the goods in a bag;
? make payment; and
? receive change.

It has several quite sophisticated elements, e.g., the receiving bag is on a weighing scale and provides check between bar-code scanned and item added. Another is that items without bar-codes are grouped differently in such a way that its price can still be scanned. It can also virtually accept all kinds of payments except cheques. The customer interaction is undertaken using an 80486-driven display, and is sufficiently flexible that it may be modified to support additional services in future, such as the payment of bills from other companies and from utilities, airline reservations, etc. In this way, Price Chopper would be able to extend the already very substantial financial services it offers to its supermarket customers. It is in this way that the Price Chopper strategies prove to be very useful to its customers thus maximizing its relevance and increasing the customer traffic and sales.

4. Price Chopper also intends using its well-established infrastructure to support micro or target marketing. For example, they will be able to detect the presence of an occasional customer at their checkout counter and make a special offer (a 'delayed purchase incentive') designed to turn the person into a frequent shopper. This is an added marketing strategy that intends to pull customers back again.

5. Price Chopper is participating in the emergence of efficient customer response (ECR), a generalised form of quick response (QR). This involves partnering along the industry value-chain, and cooperation among the partners' data processing systems. It opens up a variety of new opportunities, such as the conversion of coupons from paper to electronic form, and the customisation of coupon offers. This in turn gives more convenience on the part of the customers.

6. Price Chopper has, like most supermarkets in the United States, long ago implemented EDI for purchase orders. Deliveries to Price Chopper stores are now received by direct store delivery (DSD) from suppliers, rather than passing through the company's own warehouses. Price Chopper has recently implemented EDI for goods receipt and invoicing to exploit this development. The purposes in doing so were to ensure capture of all relevant data at the point of origin, and hence reduce both the overheads and disruption arising from errors, and the treble-handling of deliveries as goods receipts, as invoice-receipts, and as invoice-payments.

CONCLUSION:

Price Chopper considers that it is fulfilling the objectives of its aggressive and ambitious application of IT to the point of sale. As a result of internal cost-savings, increased custom, and the fees it gains from the sale of transaction data to financial institutions, its network operations are contributing a million dollars per annum to corporate profits.
So this is how Price Chopper does the pushing - it its very aggressive and assertive in implementing their marketing efforts and strategies through the use of Information Technology so that they can pull their customers and make them frequent shoppers of Price Chopper Supermarket.