How many people buy from Checkers, but never go to a Checkers?
There's obviously a good explanation, but we're not clever enough to work it out.
Other day we walked passed a Checkers supermarket.
There was a big line of Sixty60 motorbikes ready to head off with their orders, picked off the shelves of the store...heading straight to pleased customers enjoying the radical convenience of the app. Nice.
Sixty60 is a fantastic case study of "creative destruction".
In other words; strategically turning on a radical innovation that breaks the category specific market- and technology-linkages in the system to effectively destroy the relevance and value of what is offered by the entrenched status quo with a new, better alternative built anew.
Make the old irrelevant by offering the market a radically better approach.
But while walking past the shop it dawn on us that we buy from Checkers all of the time, but couldn't remember the last time we had stepped inside a Checkers store and bought anything in the shop itself.
Cannibalising the foot traffic of their own stores in favour of redirecting that trade towards the app was no doubt part of the strategy.
"Kill your own business, before somebody else does it for you;" is the mantra of innovation. And in the case of Checkers - the mad gamble worked really, really well. Word on the street - keep it hush hush - is that the app is processing in excess of R1.3 billion a month. Yes, the products are still coming from a Checkers supermarket, but why continue to pay retail overheads for warehouse space?
And yet the old Checkers supermarkets are still around.
The obvious question that then come up is..."Have Checkers seen a notable reduction in the volume of customer foot traffic (sales is a poor indicator because Sixty60 sales would be recorded as an assigned metric to a store and non-customer foot traffic is misleading because pickers working on behalf of online customers will be doing the shopping in the aisles on their behalf) that get processed through their physical stores?
And then...if there is a measurable reduction: "Is the Shoprite group forecasting a curtailing of physical store growth as a result of lower projected levels of customer demand to personally engage in physical grocery shopping."
If we never set foot inside a Checkers store ever again, nothing would be amiss in our lives; we just wonder if we're the only ones, or is this sentiment starting to emerge within the collective?
Ultimately though - no matter what channel is used by the customer, the winner here is Checkers. Their market share growth is the metric that matters. Radical innovation then didn't kill the previous version of the system, but increasing accessibility to the value offered by the brand has certainly captured more of the market.