While nine of 10 US grocery store department managers in a recent survey said they love their jobs, many lamented “not having enough time” to do them effectively even though survey participants gave themselves high marks for time management.

About half of the respondents said their departments don’t get “enough labor hours to effectively complete our work and serve the customers.” Tight payroll and labor budgets are one of the food retail industry’s biggest challenges, according to the Supermarket Department Manager Survey conducted by the Food Marketing Institute. Grocery departments are understaffed and as a result, managers feel their effectiveness suffers.

Tight payroll and labor budgets come as no surprise in an industry that operates on razor-thin margins. More surprising – and encouraging – is that even with these negatives, 90 percent of survey participants said they agree or strongly agree with the statements, “I love my job,” and, “I find my job to be personally rewarding.”

While 90 percent is impressive, we shouldn’t dismiss the issues that are troubling managers, including a shortage of labor hours to effectively service customers. One way to address them is to ensure responsibilities such as cash management don’t take up a disproportionate amount of the supermarket managers’ time.

Cash-handling Challenges

We know cash management is a big challenge for many retail organizations, including grocery stores. Consider these statistics:

• Cashiers spend an average of two minutes per transaction counting cash and making change.
• Grocery retail clerks spend two and a half hours on average completing their daily drawer balances.
• An average of 11 drawers are counted per day, each taking seven minutes to count. Cashiers do counts before and after their shifts, which means they spend at least 14 minutes daily on them.

Now, if you calculate the time managers have to spend recounting each drawer to verify float or the cashiers’ numbers, it really adds up. If all goes well, you’re looking at more than an hour each day. But what happens when a manager finds a discrepancy? It has to be investigated. If more than one occurs in a day, you’re looking at a considerable amount of time to reconcile the discrepancy and, if needed, retrain cashiers who make mistakes.

The SMARTtill^® Solution

Automated cash management solutions are the answer to reducing time spent on handling cash. Our SMARTtill^® Intelligent Cash Drawer Solution, for instance, cuts cash-handling time both at the POS and in the backroom.

With its intelligent built-in currency-weighing technology, the SMARTtill^® Solution puts an end to lengthy cash reconciliation, downtime at POS terminal stations to count bills and coins, and end-of-shift counts. This reduces labor costs and provides a better customer experience as change inquiries are resolved quickly. Minutes spent on daily manual counting equate to hours per week which can be reapplied to other departments where timing is tight.

The SMARTtill^® Solution also cuts down on cashier training because its management software keeps a record of all activity at each drawer, making it easy to identify training needs or a recurring problem with an employee.

The SMARTtill^® Cash Management Technology helps alleviate some of the pain points brought to light by the Supermarket Department Manager Survey, particularly the need for managers to find more time to do their jobs effectively and improves the store’s operational efficiency overall.