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With so much focus on the fresh food movement, we shouldn’t lose sight of the importance of a grocer’s prepared food items. There are still plenty of customers that don’t cook on a regular basis, or simply don’t have time in their busy schedule to devote to preparing food at home. And don’t forget that prepared foods—meats, salads, cold cuts, sliced cheeses, cakes, pies, and so on—are wildly popular for holidays and convenient for impromptu gatherings of family and friends.

Over the past 12 months, three major E. coli outbreaks decimated sales of Romaine lettuce, rearranging and upsetting the salad bowls of America. Numerous salmonella scares caused recalls of eggs, chicken, and turkey—not to mention nearly 20 million pounds of ground beef—from many different suppliers. And that’s just a fraction of fresh food recalls that made the news in 2018, and it doesn’t touch on recalls of packaged, frozen, or prepared foods.

Ask any retailer, and you’ll be hard pressed to find one that isn’t worried about rising competition from online shopping. eCommerce technology solutions can help retailers fight back on that front. However, according to Forbes, the true disruptors aren’t online giants like Amazon or Walmart. Instead, there’s a quieter and stealthier threat to the strained margins of traditional grocers: the “dollar stores.”

At TRUNO headquarters in Lubbock, Texas, we may not have snow for the holidays—it’s not even dipped to freezing this week—but we can’t help inserting the holiday spirit into everything we do this time of year. Lately we’ve written about what we’re so thankful for in 2018, as well as this year’s perfect Christmas gift for retailers. We even talked about how to stay jolly while protecting yourselves from holiday shoplifters.

At TRUNO, we have a lot to be thankful for: our customers, our partners and all the great folks who make up the TRUNO team. But we’re also thankful for data, because it drives so much of what we do as a company and how we’re able to help retailers thrive.

TRUNO has its roots in point of sale solutions, which means we understand both the complexity and the importance of those systems. We also know it’s vital your POS integrates seamlessly with your back office software. Together, these solutions create the lifeblood of your store. But as customer preferences and needs change, you’ll need new and different technology in order to keep up.

As vice president of sales for TRUNO, I’m constantly thinking about how we can improve the lives of store operators. My passion for helping retailers solve challenges is a direct result of my own career in the industry. I know first-hand the thoughts that keep a store operator up at night, but I also know how the proper retail technology can help them sleep easier.

Having spent my entire career in the grocery industry, I’ve had first-hand experience with the challenges our customers face. I spent more than a decade as an IT director for a 14-store grocery chain. While that role presented plenty of challenges, it gave me insight into one of the most difficult roles in the grocery store—back office management. 

Not so many years ago, grocery shopping used to be a more personal experience. Families shopped at the same store every time, usually on Sundays, to buy food and supplies for the week. It was quite common—and even expected—for shoppers to build relationships with store employees. The butcher knew customers’ names and what cuts their families preferred. And the cashier greeted them with a smile and asked them how their day was going.

These days everything is going digital. More and more shoppers are going online, even when making everyday purchases like groceries for the week. With this in mind, retailers are looking for ways to enhance the in-store experience by adding digital elements. Converting to electronic shelf labels is a seemingly small change grocers can make, but one that has a surprisingly big impact on the bottom line, customer experience and employee morale.