The success was “immediate”. On Friday morning, the director of the Auchan brand in Dieppe spoke of the success of the “mystery car” operation launched a few weeks ago. The principle is to buy a shopping cart three times cheaper than its value but without knowing what it contains.
“It was born in a work meeting and we needed a slightly different operation to generate traffic and expectation,” explains Jérémy Juan. We started with 40 caddies, posted on our Facebook page, and within 30 minutes we had over 200 comments. and the shopping carts were already pre-sold.”
Given the magnitude of the demand, the store manager decided to repeat the operation and has already managed to sell around 500 shopping carts. “We try to space out the operations to give the client a little time to repurchase and not saturate the operation,” he explains. “We are going in crescendo and when we carry out the operation today, we take more than 150 shopping carts because the demand is there.”
Customers exchange products with each other.
Some see this operation as a maneuver to encourage customers to buy products that are not sold and that they do not really need. “These are products that were not very successful in the first sales and we give them another chance,” says Jérémy Juan. We mix the products so that the customer finds what they are looking for, that is why we have appliances, home decoration products, toys as well.”
Additionally, customers quickly found a solution to counteract the unfamiliar nature of carts: bartering. “What we noticed was that customers gathered at the checkouts and exchanged their products: in the end everyone was satisfied,” says the director of Auchan Dieppe. […] We might have expected people to be disappointed with products they don’t need, but the exact opposite happened. We have loyal customers who buy mystery carts again.” For the store manager, the operation is above all a way to guarantee the sale of manufactured products to prevent them from eventually being discarded:
Source: BFM TV
