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Family-Owned Grocery Store Increases Efficiency with Catapult
Bi-Rite community grocery store has been in the same location in San Francisco since 1940 and has been under the ownership of the Mogannam family since 1964. Owner Sam Mogannam and his brother have been owners since late 1997, at which point they gutted the space, redid it and opened back up in the middle of 1998. According to Mogannam, they strive to emulate the great neighborhood markets of Manhattan. Bi-Rite focuses on a lot of sustainable products, predominately organic produce, sustainable meats, and fish. With a grocery and health food concentration, Bi-Rite searches out the best of what it can find to provide to its clientele. The store is just two blocks away from Mission Dolores, a historical landmark that has one of the best views of San Francisco and the downtown skyline.
ECRS: Tell us a little about your customers?
Mogannam: Our clientele consists of working professionals, young families, and singles. There are a lot of apartments intermixed with condo's and flats, so the core age of shoppers ranges from the mid 20's to late 40's. We are in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in San Francisco. We have three POS terminals and 40 employees, with a customer flow of about 800 people a day.
ECRS: How has Catapult made things easier for you at the POS?
Mogannam: Catapult has really increased efficiency through our checkout lines. It has given us the opportunity to track item movement, and has been helpful in helping reduce cashier errors. The system's Automatic POS Redundancy feature ensures optimum register uptime, which is a great piece of mind. We have improved our margins over the past six months, which has helped increase our volume. With our old system, we had issues with long customer lines, but Catapult has really changed that. It's now very easy to train new cashiers as well.
ECRS: How did you arrive at Catapult as the automation solution for your store?
Mogannam: We were shopping around for a POS system because we were working for too long with stand-alone registers. We were sold on Catapult from the start, because it had everything we needed and more. Plus, Catapult came highly recommended from our representative at our primary wholesaler.
ECRS: Which reports do you rely on most?
Mogannam: The most common reports we use are the Item Movement report, Department Net Sales report, and Inventory Sales by power field. There are two of us who went to Catapult University which helped give us a greater understanding of the system, and made me feel more confident about our decision to purchase Catapult. I think we are going to be sending someone to the advanced class soon, as there are still a lot of things Catapult can do for us that we don't fully utilize just yet.
ECRS: In what other ways is Catapult helping you automate your processes?
Mogannam: We are scanning, using LabelVision, and generating a lot of our own barcodes. Catapult is allowing us to track our costs versus sales and is letting us track our margins right down to the SKU level. Cashiers used to manually enter the department that an item belonged in, which left a lot of room for mistakes. The combination of Catapult's LabelVision interface and the system's POS scanning has completely solved this problem for us.
ECRS: Would you recommend Catapult to other retailers?
Mogannam: Absolutely. I cannot stress enough how much time it has saved everyone here. Catapult is very intuitive and keeps the pace with our heavy
flow of day-to-day business.
ECRS: Can you comment on the quality of technicalsupport you have received with Catapult?
Mogannam: Technical support has been amazing. We knew that moving from stand-alone cash registers to a modern POS system would be a challenging task. The ECRS Support team has really been there for us all along.
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