This video made me chuckle.
You know, I often equate what goes on in a grocery store with what goes on in a library… why is that? I guess we’re talking two retail spaces I visit often. Ones with lots of resources available for me to choose what I need. Ones centered around user needs and demands. Ones where the organization of materials is critical and easy access to products is vital. Ones where experience is often as important as content.
So what do supermarkets do right that libraries can learn from and emulate? What do they do wrong that we can learn from? (mistakes we can avoid.)
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July 4th, 2007 at 8:36 am
I originally liked the idea of comparing the library with a supermarket - but then I got to thinking.
The one thing that makes a supermarket substantially different from a library is that people, generally, have to use it. No choice in the matter, if they want to eat.
We don’t have that, as libraries. There are plenty of other possibilities out there for our users. A lot of our younger users don’t want to wait. They buy their own books, music and movies, and most of what else they could want from the libraries - they go on-line to find.
But, sure, I’ve used the principle in my own library. When music in libraries was the new, big thing, we put it at the farthest point - in keeping with the milk-strategy our local supermarket employs. These days - it’s the movies and the games. The point of which is to force our users to traverse a great deal of our (admittedly) very small library - to subject them to as much of it as we can.
July 5th, 2007 at 9:56 am
That’s a good point. People don’t need to use the library. I think that makes it even more essential that we do things that make it more appealing for use.
The one thing above all others that makes me lump supermarkets and libraries together in my mind is the “errand” aspect of each of these. As a library patron, I really think of it as one more errand I have to run: pick up dry cleaning, buy milk, drop off dog at groomer’s, pick up hold items at the library. I think that library staff sometimes have a hard time thinking of the library like that, since it’s such a big part of their lives. But for many patrons it’s just one more thing to do. So I think that modeling at least some of our services on a grab-and-go mentality could really help attract and keep customers who lead busy lives in which the library only plays a minor role.
I know a lot of libraries force their customers to pass through the rest of the collection to reach the high demand items. Sometimes, though, I wonder if that really works. I know that as a library user I get really annoyed at anything that’s even the slightest bit inconvenient. (I guess I fall into that category of people who don’t want to wait! I have stuff to do!!) I wonder if there is a way to tell if making people walk past other materials really makes them more inclined to use the other materials, or if it’s just causing traffic problems?