How Many Cart Corrals Are Enough?
August 27th, 2008 by Erin Burke
Wouldn’t it be absolutely wonderful if shoppers always returned their carts to a cart corral when they were finished unloading their purchases? Can you see it now, your parking lot looks fantastically neat and appealing to shoppers passing by and there’s no need to hire that extra cart retriever?A while back, McCue ran an independent research project to uncover how many cart corrals were needed in store parking lots to encourage voluntary cart return. To do this we observed shopper behavior in various parking lots and took statistics in terms of voluntary cart return by customers. We also questioned shoppers and asked them why they did or didn’t return their cart and asked them in general terms, “How far are you willing to walk from your car to a corral to return a shopping cart?”
From the data we collected and the shopper responses we got, we determined that a customer would need to walk only 8 spaces or less to return a cart to a corral from anywhere in the parking lot. So for a parking lot of say 452 parking spaces, there should be 14 cart corrals appropriately placed so the customers only need walk 8 parking spaces to the nearest cart corral.
What we want to know is, “Does this still hold water?” Has anyone else done research on voluntary cart return and come up with different facts? If you have or if you’ve read anything about this subject matter please take a couple of minutes to post a reply to this posting and share your information with our online community.
tagged: Cart Corrals, Parking Lot, Shoppping Carts
December 4th, 2008 at 4:15 am
The theme is opened completely and very actual! Thanks the author of a blog!