Technology: Foodtown/Freshtown (PSK Supermarkets), Mount Vernon, N.Y.

PSK Supermarkets, a 13-store independent family-run grocery chain in the New York metropolitan area, uses technology in a variety of ways to deepen relationships between customers and team members to drive sales and remain competitive.

Foodtown has offered an ecommerce site for online shopping for three years. Its stores face fierce competition when it comes to online shopping, but PSK has been steadily building its online shopping business to compete with an array of rival internet shopping services in their marketplace. The key to the service is personal shoppers, who get to know their customers, and go up and down the aisles shopping the orders.

“By providing our customers a state-of-the-art platform and combining it with personalized service, we can outcompete all the other companies in the online space,” affirms Noah Katz, co-president.

PSK Foodtown also “has been fully invested in loyalty marketing for years,” notes Katz. With the help of its loyalty vendor, PSK uses the vast amounts of data it collects to reward shoppers in the ways they want.

“Our program is as extensive as what you see in the casinos and credit card industry when it comes to loyalty marketing,” he adds.

Best Customers earn higher levels of rewards, based on their shopping patterns in the store — the more they spend, the more they get back.

On the back end, PSK updated its human capital management system to the Ceridian Dayforce platform, which provides a real-time, cloud-based, single HR record for each associate.

VP Ed Hunt notes: “I can view, in real time, how much money we are spending, by region, by store, by department, by day on payroll, compared to what our managers promised us they were going to spend when the schedules were posted.”