Column: Moving Inexorably into Yesteryear

Putting out the call for Shopper Marketing Hall of Fame nominations (as Bill Schober did in the October issue) always gets us thinking about the industry’s past, present and future. Sometimes, all three seem to blend together.In the 1950s and early 1960s, my father was a store manager for Peter Reeves Markets, a chain of small grocery stores in the New York City area.For some reason, this local retailer seems to have faded further into history than most other topics, and Google searches don’t uncover much information beyond grainy “That Was Then” photos from newspaper archives and “There used to be a Peter Reeves on the corner” reminiscent asides within family narratives. (Any supermarket industry mavens out there who remember some details?)My father didn’t pass on much information either. By the time I entered the world, the chain had gone out of business and he’d moved on to another line of work. When he did share an occasional story, it invariably would focus on one of the colorful customers who frequented the store rather than the general trials and tribulations of retailing. Although I might suggest that those two topics were more inherently linked back then.Home delivery was, in fact, standard practice for supermarkets up until the 1920s, which is about the time that large national chains began gaining market share at the expense of local businesses. The story I remember most vividly involved a fairly affluent spinster who was never seen around the neighborhood without her outlandishly pampered toy poodle. The dog frequently visited the store (it couldn’t be left tied up outside, of course), and my father would occasionally visit the woman’s apartment to feed and walk the animal when she’d be gone for the better part of a day.It should, then, come as no surprise to hear that this dog had a picky palate and would eat only a single variety of one pet food brand – a variety that, naturally, wasn’t favored by any other dog and, therefore, any other dog owner, in the neighborhood. The woman was, literally, the only shopper who ever bought the product. But my father made sure that it never went out of stock. And she never shopped anywhere else.And since walking your customer’s dog wasn’t out of bounds back then, it also won’t be a surprise to hear that Peter Reeves Markets also provided home delivery service to anyone who wanted it.Home delivery was, in fact, standard practice for supermarkets up until the 1920s, which is about the time that large national chains began gaining market share at the expense of local businesses. It was still pretty common in the ‘50s and even into the ‘60s, and it never went away entirely. (Alex P. Keaton delivered as part of his duties at Adler’s Grocery on “Family Ties” in the early 1980s, if you’re willing to accept pop culture anecdotes as evidence.)I’m guessing that, as the decades passed and retailing became less a neighborhood-level endeavor and more a Wall Street-driven enterprise, the need for scalable operational efficiencies made the continued practice unfeasible. Delivery is far less manageable when your entire shopper base doesn’t live within a walking – or at least biking – distance.Operational efficiency was also the main impetus behind the steady migration away from store-level merchandising toward chainwide procurement and planogramming. The number of available SKUs rose dramatically and choice, in theory at least, rose accordingly. But the attention to local product needs – let alone the demands of one persnickety customer and her dog – diminished substantially.And now we find ourselves in an era when most traditional retailers are scrambling to turn back the clock and find simple, affordable ways to provide home delivery services. And when the immediacy of e-commerce is making it more important than ever to address the specific needs of individual shoppers.Apparently, shopper marketing wasn’t a concept ahead of its time. It was a concept that sat around for a few decades waiting for the industry to remember what used to work.And so, since the Institute is heading into awards season and we’ll soon be undertaking the real, serious business of evaluating legitimate nominees for the 2016 Shopper Marketing Hall of Fame, I’d first like to propose a retroactive (and wholly symbolic) nomination: My dad, and every other store manager from the past who knew instinctively that deep shopper insights inform effective marketing and merchandising practices, that shopper behavior needs to be understood at the granular level, and that shopper loyalty is a natural byproduct of relevant, personalized service. But granted, the dog-walking thing probably went a bit too far.Peter Breen is managing director – special content for the Path to Purchase Institute. He can be reached at (773) 992-4431 or pbreen@p2pi.org.

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