How Efficient Day Cleaning Satisfies Customers, Empowers Employees
Over the past few years, store managers have weathered a lot of change, and it’s not over yet. Supply chain disruptions, shocks to the labor market and the rise of e-commerce continue to resonate through the food retail industry, according to New York-based global consulting group McKinsey & Co.
Yet many things remain the same. While online shopping grows in importance, it will never replace the in-store experience. In fact, a whopping 95% of consumers purchased grocery items from a traditional brick-and-mortar store, according to a report from Chicago-based PowerReviews.
[Watch more: "Clean and Simple Solutions for a Better Store Experience" on-demand webinar]
This means that, despite all of the disruption, consumers still crave the in-person experience. They want to spend time in a visibly clean store, complete with a spotless entry, gleaming floors, fresh restrooms, and no slippery or sticky spills to navigate. They also demand this high level of sanitation no matter what time of day they shop.
Delivering a consistent level of clean throughout the day can be difficult. Labor is expensive and hard to find, and the workers you have are already stretched thin. Asking them to take on unpleasant, time-consuming cleaning jobs with inefficient tools won’t deliver the results that today’s consumer demands. Even worse, it may damage your store’s valuable brand.
There are better processes and tools to make cleaning easier and more effective. Here’s how to optimize labor, deliver consistent and repeatable results, and protect your store’s brand.
Clean Entryways
Entryways make that important first impression, so they must be spotless. Yet entries take a constant beating from heavy foot traffic and weather-related messes like pools of rainwater or tracked-in ice melt. Some, but not all, of this dirt, grit and chemical residue will be trapped by walk-off mats. The rest will move through the store, marring floor finish, creating dangerous wet spots, and, in the case of ice melt, leaving a sticky, hard-to-remove residue.
Your overnight cleaning team will typically service the entryway floor with an autoscrubber, but that tool isn’t available or practical for day cleaning. A low-tech bucket and mop offer a quick fix, but mopping comes with its own issues. It’s physically demanding and time-consuming, and doesn’t actually remove dirt, grit and chemical residue as much as spread it around. Mopping also leaves floors wet, creating a dangerous slip-and-fall risk.
There are smaller-footprint floor machines that clean entryways quickly and effectively. These easy-to-use tools employ extractive technology to fully remove and contain messes. After one pass, floors are clean, dry and safe to walk on in a fraction of the cleaning time. This lets employees focus on higher-value customer service tasks.
Create Fresh Restrooms and Empowered Employees
The state of your store restrooms can make or break reputations. Food retailers invest in building out large, bright, inviting restrooms. It doesn’t take much, however, to turn the most appealing interior into an unpleasant, brand-damaging experience. Studies show that customers won’t return to a store with littered, smelly, soiled or unsanitary restrooms, and really, who can blame them?
In this case, waiting for the nightly cleaning team isn’t an option, but asking employees to tackle this unpleasant job with a bucket, mop and rags isn’t ideal, either. With these tools, workers must kneel, bend, twist and get really close to an offensive and potentially dangerous mess.
A better, more empowering solution is a spray-and-vac machine. This technology works quickly to produce reliable, repeatable results. Employees dispense specifically designed cleaning chemicals onto restroom surfaces, and then power-spray the soil and chemical slurry to the floor. Finally, workers suck up the slurry with a powerful vacuum, eliminating spread and focusing on removal.
This method is superior to buckets and mops in many ways. The process is faster, more complete, and leaves restroom floors dry. The machine reaches all surfaces while allowing employees to remain in a standing position. This means they can clean without twisting, bending, or having to touch dirty, disgusting surfaces.
Remove Greasy Messes From the In-Store Kitchen
In-store food prep areas are busy, hard-working and potentially greasy spaces. This hard, tacky grease can be so difficult to remove that many grocers buy expensive deep-cleaning services a few times a year on top of their regular nightly cleaning routine.
A more complete daily cleaning process, however, controls grease so well that those expensive add-on services may no longer be necessary. These processes and compact, easy-to-use tools remove grease particles before they have a chance to harden into a stubborn, tacky mess.
Workers flood the floor with a grease-removing cleaning chemical, agitate the solution with a deck brush and suck up the slurry using vacuum extraction.
This fast, effective process leaves floors and even stubborn grout lines clean, dry and grease-free. It’s so quick and effective that employees can clock out early or shift their attention to other tasks.
Clean Spills for Safety
Spills happen, but accidents become dangerous slip-and-fall hazards if not addressed immediately. Mops and buckets may seem like a quick, easy fix for unexpected messes, but these tools are cumbersome, time-consuming and unpleasant to use. Mops also leave floors wet, creating another slip-and-fall hazard to worry about.
Instead, choose a better spill response process, driven by vacuum extraction, to completely remove the spill and the risks of a wet floor. Vacuum extraction sucks the mess away, prevents stains from penetrating the finish and leaves floors dry. Switching to an easy, satisfying process like this empowers your employees to finish the task quickly, lessening your slip-and-fall liability through reduced time to dry (TTD).
Keep Cooler Cases Clean
Refrigerated display cases are a challenge to clean, but running them with clogged drains, dirty fans and dusty condenser coils costs money. An EPA study reported that as little as 0.042 inches of dirt on condensing coils will cause a 21% drop in efficiency and can increase refrigeration energy use by 35%. Continuing to run dirty equipment leads to expensive service calls and decreased refrigerated display case life.
Unfortunately, manually cleaning these display cases is slow and laborious, and comes with the risk of injury from sharp sheet metal and coil surfaces.
Having dedicated display case cleaning machines makes servicing this equipment in-house easy and fast. These tools use advanced processes to spray, clean and vacuum away dirt, germs, liquids and food residue. Cases look clean, smell fresh, work more efficiently and last much longer.
Cleanliness has never been more vital to a grocery’s reputation and bottom line. Investing in better day-cleaning processes will engage employees by empowering them to drive store cleanliness, no matter what happens throughout the day.
