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from the just-wait-until-the-cameras-get-hacked dept.
As online giant Amazon.com Inc. charges into the $300 billion U.S. apparel market, Macy's Inc. is running for the dressing room.
Even Macy's acknowledges there's little it can do to keep customers from shopping online for basic clothing -- like T-shirts, men's jeans and tighty whities. Yet the department store chain is clinging to the idea that many consumers will want to try on other kinds of apparel, such as bikinis, bras and high-fashion items, before making a purchase.
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As part of its effort, Macy's recently revamped its fitting rooms in the women's swimsuit and athletic department at its Manhattan Beach, California, store. Macy's is using technology - - smartphones and company-provided tablets -- to make it easier for customers to try on items without having to leave the dressing room or ask a sales clerk for more help.
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Shoppers browse swimsuits and yoga pants displayed on mannequins. When a style looks interesting, they use a Macy's app on their smartphones or the tablets to select their sizes. The items are delivered to a fitting room through a chute. Once in the fitting room, customers can request more sizes and other items using the app.The result is that shoppers spend more time browsing and less time undressing, redressing and rummaging through racks, increasing the likelihood they'll find something to buy.
The article does not explain how selected items find their way from the rack to the delivery chute--whether by sales employees manually finding the items or some automated process.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday August 21 2015, @12:56AM
This idea sounds like a disaster.
On the surface, it sounds reasonable: you're in the dressing room trying on some yoga pants (from TFS), and they don't fit, so you tap a few times on the tablet in there to request a different size, and some faceless employee grabs them off the rack and drops them in a chute for you to try on. What could possibly go wrong?
Simple: there's no employee immediately available, so you're twiddling your thumbs with no pants on for 5-10 minutes waiting for an employee to see your request. Then it takes them a while to get to the rack and look through every single pair of yoga pants on it to see if there's one pair in the request size, and then slowly walk back over to your room to drop them in the chute.
You were just at that rack, so you know just where it is; you could have thrown on your pants, run over to the rack, grabbed another pair, and gone and tried them on in a couple of minutes.
Maybe if they had a surplus of employees standing around waiting for this, this could work. But the problem is that, just like every retailer these days, there's a shortage of employees on the floor for the number of customers. Maybe if you go at 10AM on a weekday this will work great (because you'll be the only customer in the department), but during normal shopping times it won't.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Friday August 21 2015, @07:02AM
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday August 21 2015, @09:18PM
Won't work. The sales floor of a department store is not remotely orderly enough for robots to do that job well.
Yes, if you had everything pre-packaged in storage bins, you could do it, but there's two problems with that: 1) what do you do with all the clothes that are tried-on and rejected? Now you have to throw them away, or hope they sell off the sales floor, because you're never going to be able to repack them good enough to be put back in the automated bins (and if you can, now you need to hire a bunch of humans to do this), and 2) this means you now have to buy several times as much inventory as before. Department stores are usually short on inventory anyway (which you find every time you want some article of clothing, and look through the piles only to find they have every size *except* yours).