Supermarket Boosts Sales With Thermal Printing System

Green Hills, a high-volume supermarket in Syracuse, NY, was faced with competition from larger chains and superstores. Determined to find new ways to satisfy customers while growing its business, the store's executive team turned to a new printing solution to launch a marketing campaign.

In October 2003, Green Hills installed the A760 hybrid color thermal printer from Transaction Printer Group Inc. (TPG) (Ithaca, NY) in all 16 of the store's operating lanes. To meet Green Hills' demand for intelligent graphics and receipt messaging, TPG's receipt management software, ReceiptEZ, was incorporated and run independently of the store's existing application. Dumac Business Systems Inc, a local POS (point of sale) VAR, was enlisted by Green Hills to execute all installations, and it completed the task in one day.

Following the product installation and a couple hours of training from a TPG team, Green Hills was able to run customer-specific promotions by printing sale information at the bottom of a two-color thermal receipt. Green Hills immediately set out to determine the value of this new marketing tool.

An analysis of spending at Green Hills indicated that customer counts were down slightly at the produce and bakery departments, so the store instituted receipt-based promotions in both departments. The produce-targeted promotion yielded a 10.5% redemption rate, and customers who used the coupons spent 35% more on produce than they did during the same time period the previous year. In addition, 8% of these households were not historic patrons of the produce department.

The bakery promotion produced similar results. Five percent of coupons were redeemed, and spending by those customers increased by 57%. In addition, 31% of coupon users were new customers to the bakery. Due to the success of the promotions, the company plans to continue generating two-color receipts to increase revenues.