I frequently drive past a retail site from my childhood that was once a store called “Service Merchandise”. It had an odd concept where every item was on display and you pulled a tag (like how you bought a video game at Toys R Us back in the 1980s and 1990s). You would take this tag to the register, pay, and then go stand at a conveyer belt where your items came out (like getting luggage at the airport if memory serves). What was the perceived benefit of organizing a store this way? Were there other “catalog stores” (a term my mother uses to refer to Service Merchandise when I ask about it) or was this unique to Service Merchandise?
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The benefits are mostly for the store, not really the consumer. There’s much reduced risk of theft, and you can use the size of the location more efficiently and cheaply, because you don’t need to devote lots of floor space to holding the actual merchandise and keeping it presentable. You can just keep everything in pallets in the back.
That said, the drawbacks for the consumer aren’t too terrible. They have to wait a while while the merch is brought to the front. But hey, they don’t have to lug around all the stuff. So for your bigger items, it can be convenient.
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