Anyone who has been shopping in the past few weeks knows it. An employee often stands at the entrance and notes how many customers are currently in the store on a piece of paper or on his smartphone. One night in bed Serafino Mollino wondered why this task was not left to technology. The head of innovation at Richnerstutz went to his two bosses with his idea the next morning – four weeks later, the first Migros branches were equipped with it.
Customers are counted using a light signal
CountMe is the name of the product with which the Villmerger company wants to get started. The idea behind it is simple: the system uses light barriers or a camera on the ceiling to record when customers enter or leave the shop. When the maximum permitted number of customers in the store has been reached, a traffic light changes from green to red when it arrives and signals to those entering that they still have to be patient. On the one hand, the system is more precise than manual counting, “in addition, the shops can use the staff for other tasks,” says André Richner, Co-CEO of Richnerstutz AG. He is proud of how quickly the first prototype was ready for the market. “It normally takes six to nine months to develop such a project. It was four weeks at CountMe. » And the market has been waiting for what it seems. Approximately 170 Migros branches are already using the traffic light system. And in the past three days, the company has also equipped 150 Lidl branches with the lighting system. Richnerstutz AG is in negotiations with other retailers. Not only in Switzerland, but in several European countries.
“If we are lucky, we can now come out of the corona crisis with a black eye thanks to CountMe,” says André Richner, who has been at the helm of the company for 32 years, which is actually primarily active in the event industry and accordingly the situation early felt. “The corona pandemic is brutal for the event industry. It is the worst thing that I have experienced as a managing director. » Richner adds: “Because I didn’t know how we could get out of it reasonably harmless.”
The company has apparently found the recipe for this, but it is not yet over the hill. Two thirds of the 150 employees are still on short-time work. “The goal is that we can start up the whole company again as quickly as possible,” says the CEO. After the end of the corona crisis, i.e. after the traffic lights have disappeared from the shops, the company still wants to keep the new branch of business. Measuring customer flows is a need even without Corona, André Richner is convinced. For example, to know how many customers are in the store at what time and to be able to allocate resources accordingly.
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