Final Customer Purchasing from an Intermediary of the Product
Use Steps: Use steps include all the Final customer's activities to find the appropriate product category at the Intermediary, to choose among the alternatives to the product and to take delivery of the product.
B.
Resources: Reduce resources required for the use of the product
2.
Time: Reduce the time the customer must spend with the product
B. Improve wait times in the process
Increase service capacity
Supplement service during peak times
| No. | Year | SIC | Note |
| 1 | 2002 | 5331 | Each store at Home Depot has around seven or eight carts equipped with mobile computers and handheld scanners that enable roving employees to ring up items in a shopper's cart. The scanners, also know as "line busters", retrieve prices from the store's product database and print out a claim check that can be processed by the cashier. |
| 2 | 2002 | 5331 | Chains-including Home Depot Inc., Wal-Mart's Sam's Club and Kmart Corp.-put employees with handheld scanners in the checkout lines to help ring up customers faster. |
| 3 | 2002 | 5411 | Safeway claims its online operation is healthy and the company says the business is getting close to turning a profit. Safeway and Albertsons have big advantages over the Internet-only grocers like Webvan and HomeGrocer because they already have their own warehouses and contracts in place. Albertsons may spend $100,000 in a market to add a few trucks and hire drivers, compare this with Webvan, which spent $35 million in one market and needed a lot more customers to make it work. So far, neither Albertsons nor Peapod are turning a profit online. Albertsons expects that it will never match sales from its stores but they keep the online business because it's what the customers want. |
| 4 | 2003 | 5999 | Borders and Amazon arrangements also lets Amazon users reserve books online, then pick them up from Borders and pay Borders prices. |
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