Short & Wide for Reusable Containers

With some trendy retailing practices, you might choose to wait and see rather than jump in. Here’s an example: Asda in the UK is allowing customers in some of their stores to pay less if they bring in their own container to purchase fabric softener. Asda says that they’re thinking of expanding the option to more stores and considering how other liquid products might be sold in a similar way.
     Bring-your-own-container has been used for supermarket sales of water for years. Moving on to fabric softener and then maybe to shampoo, fruit juice, and olive oil is a natural extension. And filling up the jug you bring with you fits well with the growing bring-your-own-shopping-bags spirit.
     But there are important differences between having customers bring in their own shopping bags and having them bring in and refill their own containers. Customers won’t spend more than a few seconds tidying up shopping bags before reuse, but if it’s a container that contained fabric softener, they’ll factor in the time to clean it out. On the store side, setting up the dispensers is an expense, and you’ll want to account for cleaning up spillage from clumsy customers, plastic bottles being used once too often, and kids trying out the dispensers.
     If and when you choose to participate, consider selling the reusable containers.

• Decorate the container with the name of your store in large letters so that the container becomes a token testimonial to customer advocacy as others watch the container being filled.
• Make the container short and wide. Research at University of Michigan finds that when customers hold a container—as they will when refilling it—rather than just look at it, they will perceive the container as having more when it is that shape rather than tall and narrow.