Big boxes attempting to speed up shopping

The average shopper at a Wal-Mart supercenter spends 21 minutes in the store but finds only seven of the 10 items on his or her shopping list.

As Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, tries to boost flagging sales growth, one key is helping customers find and buy those eighth, ninth and 10th items before they rush off to their kid's soccer game. So the chain is attempting to make its sprawling stores easier to navigate. Among the changes: better signs to help shoppers find merchandise, more convenient placement of hot-selling items and staffing changes to speed up checkout times.

"We don't decide how long the people are in the store," Wal-Mart marketing chief Stephen Quinn explains. "What we decide is how easy it is for you within the 21 minutes you've allocated to get what you want."

Many of Wal-Mart's big-box brethren, from Home Depot Inc. to Best Buy Co., are also pursuing the goal of making their premises less overwhelming for shoppers. Their tools range from brighter light bulbs for quicker comparison shopping, to personal assistants catering to customers' whims. Like Wal-Mart, many are determined to eliminate lengthy checkouts, perhaps the biggest turnoff of all for harried customers.

Focusing on convenience represents a turning point for discount retailers. For years, they kept building bigger and bigger boxes, figuring the combination of low prices and huge assortment trumped other considerations. The result is that shoppers all too often spend much of their time trudging from department to department to find elusive items on their shopping list, and some give up without finding them.

Wal-Mart's efforts last year to lure upscale customers by stocking fancy merchandise and clothing largely failed. Wal-Mart's same-store sales, or those at stores open at least 12 months, rose a meager 2 percent last year, its smallest annual increase since it began tracking such sales in 1979. But Americans collectively make 127 million trips to Wal-Mart each week, and the retailer knows if it can sell each of them another item or two, it can keep its sales growing rapidly. Indeed, Wal-Mart officials say the chain's customers are spending more during each visit this year, which is helping the retailer offset a decline in overall customer visits.

At the same time, retailers with smaller-store formats are nipping at the heels of big-box retailers. Dollar stores have much less selection than a Wal-Mart or a Target, but their pricing is aggressive, and customers can buy what they want in minutes. Tesco PLC, the British grocer, plans a splashy entry into the U.S. market over the next few months with 10,000-square-foot stores, a 20th the size of a typical Wal-Mart supercenter.