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Hy-Vee Drugstore
1520 6th St. SW
Cedar Rapids

Listening and Rearranging Keys to Drugstore’s Sales Success

For the Hy-Vee Drugstore at 1520 6th St. S.W., Cedar Rapids, a little listening, a little rearranging and some good suggestive selling techniques have made a huge impact on lottery sales.

Manager Chris Wright credits his lottery DSR and his employees for letting him know that the set-up of the store's lottery vending machines wasn’t selling to the store's potential. When the store first moved to its present location about a year ago, the Pull-tab Vending Machine was placed in the Wine and Spirits section, while the Instant Ticket Vending Machine was located in the main portion of the store. Wright said at first he didn't want to use space for an on-counter instant ticket dispenser.

“It's always interesting trying to find space for everything. You don't always get your choice. Corporate tells you what you're going to put where. We didn't have room for the pull-tab machine [in the front of the store],” Wright recalled.

When his lottery DSR and employees finally talked him into moving the PTVM next to the ITVM and adding the on-counter dispenser, he never regretted it.

Wright said, “Ever since then, things have been really, really good.”

Things have been so good, in fact, that the store more than tripled its total instant ticket sales from August 2006 to August 2007, and the store's pull-tab sales increased 8 percent in that time. The store opened in its present location in late August 2006.

Wright said another key to lottery sales success for his store has been to keep dispensers full of tickets. That might sound easy, but Wright credits his bookkeeper for filling the vending machines sometimes twice per day and always making sure they're full on Friday before the weekend staff comes in because of the high volume of sales they have during that time.

Camera Manager Jean Bell is one of the ladies on the “front lines” in the store selling tickets. Wright believes her great selling techniques have helped boost sales.

“We know a lot of our customers. If they're purchasing the Pick 3 or the Pick 4 and they've got two dollars left over, I say ‘Don't you just want to maybe invest this two dollars? You might just make a couple bucks!’ [I] just talk with them, kid with them. You never know if they're going to buy or not, but you just talk with them and tell them about the different winners and stuff,” Bell said.

She said she can sell off the end of a roll of scratch tickets pretty fast by just talking with customers and asking for the sale.

“And it's fun. Most of them thoroughly enjoy it! It's a happy time,” Bell said.

Wright knows that lottery sales have changed for the better in his store in the last year and he couldn't be happier about it:

“I'm glad that I was smart enough to listen to [our DSR] and my employees [when they said,] ‘This isn't working.’ Because I could have just said, ‘That's the way it is. It's going to be that way,’ and we would have missed out on a lot of sales.”