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Duty free – the slightly different Shopping experience

Duty free is a special area. According to the Wiki definition „Duty-free shops (or stores) are retail outlets that are exempt from the payment of certain local or national taxes and duties, on the requirement that the goods sold will be sold to travelers who will take them out of the country.“

Ever­yone knows this „other“ shop­ping world from border crossings and ship and air travel, where you bring some­thing nice for the better half after the busi­ness trip to make up for the previous absence, or get a nice holi­day souve­nir for rela­ti­ves. Some also simply cover their tobacco needs quite low priced outside the EU.

Passen­gers arri­ving from abroad espe­ci­ally like to buy local specia­li­ties from the region of the airport, e.g. choco­la­tes with the Colo­gne Cathe­dral as an imprint or a photo book with Hamburg’s sight­see­ing high­lights.

The staff in the shops often have a lot of time and are available for advi­sing custo­mers; in addi­tion, the shel­ves are tidied and clea­ned seve­ral times a day. Every tradi­tio­nal retailer dreams of this luxury in regards to perso­nell. Howe­ver, seve­ral times a day at airports there is the bizarre situa­tion that a large plane with 500 people lands and they all storm into the duty free area to get the best offers. And that’s where it gets exci­ting.

Because there is no real storage space at the airport and even if there would be, you can’t pick it up so quickly and refill again. So as many popu­lar products as possi­ble are squeezed into the shel­ves. But since most people are like lemmings, of course many want to have what most people buy, because that must be some­thing special or cheap. So there is also some­ti­mes disap­point­ment and out of stock.

After this rush, the employees clean up, brea­the deeply, remove the chaos and refill the shel­ves. And then again it follows the quiet before the storm, or rather before the next arri­val.

It’s clear that in this envi­ron­ment nobody thinks about push­feeds and shelf manage­ment, right?

Wrong! Years ago we successfully tested push­feeds and divi­ders with the company Gebr. Heine­mann and rolled out the system in the Travel Value Shops of seve­ral airports in Europe.

The Gebr. Heine­mann shop mana­ger from Hamburg Airport alre­ady confirmed the posi­tive sales uplift and the redu­ced main­ten­ance effort: “Auto­ma­tic push­feeds guaran­tee a constantly attrac­tive shelf appearance, espe­ci­ally when rota­tion is high”.

Now, howe­ver, the special fire protec­tion regu­la­ti­ons for Duty free had to be conside­red. But even this was no obsta­cle for us, because accor­ding to the test report, all our products meet the strict fire protec­tion requi­re­ments, as experts confirmed.

Some­ti­mes there are also very simple reasons to test a POS TUNING push­feed: Impe­rial Tobacco (in Germany Reemtsma) brought new David­off outers into the market, but in upright format and with little depth — the result: the products fell over and the optics were down the drain. Fort­u­na­tely, we were able to help and supplied our systems for seve­ral airports world­wide, so that these products were always stan­ding on the shel­ves like a One.

But now we have also conque­red the sea! Impe­rial Tobacco has now instal­led our push­feeds on the Aida cruise ships for the first time!

We thank our great part­ner and are very happy!
In this spirit, POS TUNING wishes you a good ride and a good flight!

Heinemann Store
AIDA
POS TUNING Regalordnungssysteme auf der AIDA
POS Regalordnungssysteme im Bereich Tabak auf der AIDA