Holy shit, Service Merchandise, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. You just reminded me of taking the tag to the counter. Didn’t circuit city also do tag pulls?

Toys R Us for video games as well.

that would kill impulse buying

Clearly you don’t work in digital advertising

Canadian Tire isn’t far off from this. They’ve put so much effort into making their stores as unpleasant and time wasting of an experience as they can. I pretty much only go there when I need something I can only get there, now.

Go back to the old General Store model where you’d bring your list and have them pick it out?

I would pick up 60 2-liter sodas at a time from my Wal-Mart, if they would let me place an order and let me pick it up. Sadly, only delivery is allowed to have the variety of drinks that I want.

Nah, it would be more expensive since they would need to hire more pickers. also would probably loose customers who wouldn’t want someone else picking out their groceries.

Nah, Amazon and the like already do it. Robot pickers are far cheaper than worrying about theft prevention.

Also, B&H in Manhattan has an insane set-up for shuttling inventory from the back to the sales register for check up.

Ok, but robot pickers are expensive capital costs, and are set up to work in a warehouse environment with boxes, not a retail store full of soft goods and shelves. Unless you’re talking about recapitalizing the entire store to be a wearhouse, in which case there is a huge opportunity cost in regards to using good retail realestate for a warehouse.

Gonna have to use human pickers unless the grocery store is willing to completely recapitalize and the margins might not justify the high cost of retail real estate.