Retail Lighting
Scene 1: A dark evening, slightly overcast. You stand outside the convenience store window, “open” sign in the door, but you’re nervous. The fluorescent lights that aren’t off, flicker slightly, just as the wind lifts your hat off your head. You turn to leave, deciding not to go inside.
Scene 2: A dark evening, slightly overcast. You stand outside the convenience store window, “open” sign in the door, but you’re nervous. The lighting inside bright, welcoming, beckons safety just as the wind lifts your hat off your head. You push open the door.
Just as writers can use certain words to create mood and evoke your emotions, so too can lighting. Poor lighting sends shivers down our spines or causes us to see something ordinary, as ugly.
Alternatively, it can enhance the colours (and psychologically) the flavours we expect, luminous oranges instead of insipid citrus. There is no space where you want to keep customers lingering, create appetites, increase spending, than in a shop. You need good lighting.
As the retailer, you have certain requirements for lighting – customers need to see, and they need to like what they see. But you also need to bear in mind your electricity bill, so sensible choices need to be made. In South Africa, your load-shedding schedule means you need to have things on backup power, so your batteries or generating capacity are important – again, sensible choices need to be made. You will have staff on duty that, over an 8-hour shift, will be impacted by the lighting far more than customers who only spend an hour or so, shopping. Above and beyond all this – you need to pay for this lighting, so it needs to fit your tight budget, but you don’t want to do maintenance every 6 months, so it needs to be decent quality with service and technical support. To top it off – there are government regulations telling you how much lighting is required in different areas, but how are you supposed to know when you reach that point?
You might have an architect or designer working on your project, specifying joinery details, finishes, and equipment, but they also don’t have all the answers to the bigger lighting picture. Most of the lighting sales representatives that I’ve met over the years, can’t tell me the SANS required lux level for a small retail space*, so they’re not always a source of useful information. Enter your lighting engineer.
The customers’ experience will change through the course of the shopping experience – it should; otherwise, your shop is probably too uniform and boring, and no one likes that. Apparel retailers use lighting in very fun ways, often including newer technology and LED strips to highlight shelves. They can get away with more in terms of regulation, as they don’t fit the “standard” for retail regulations; essentially just the general safety factors and cashier/check-out counter. Specialist stores will have different needs in terms of the product on display – for instance, car dealerships and high-end ladies’ boutiques are both “retail,” but oh so different.
Let’s, for the sake of this post, use a large, franchised supermarket as our example, with a deli, a wine section, general groceries, promotional areas, and a check-out.
At the entrance, you want to show customers which way to enter for the flow of traffic, as you want to avoid congestion with new arriving customers and happy, leaving customers exiting the same door. A brighter light over the area where you keep the baskets or trolleys is a start. Highlighting a security guard without creating an interrogation room will increase a sense of safety.
In the fresh produce section, lighting should enhance the colours of fresh items, and be technically suitable for the refrigerated areas (cold influences performance, even on LEDs). It should be lit enough to show scars and marks on your potatoes, but not so much that you rush to the next section.
The wine display needs to accommodate the extra glare from all the glass while maintaining a more romantic feeling. The positions of the lights are more critical here, and a good solution is spotlights, so you can have dual angles on almost all items. Bright enough to read labels, but not so that you want to get a cheap bottle and flee.
The delicatessen and butchery might employ an older tactic that some consider “cheating” – they use lights with a slight red tint to enhance the colour of the meat and make it look more appealing. (This also happens with the bakery (yellow) and fresh produce (green), by the way). Present-day LEDs can provide CRI values over 90, which is very close to natural light, so the red-tint-tactic is becoming a thing of the past.
General groceries in the aisles are simpler, but not exempt from needing some thought. The high shelves block the light from anywhere but right overhead the walkway. This creates the problem that light from right overhead is right overhead, not on the shelf you’re looking at. The solution is to use longer, linear fittings, and incorporate asymmetrical optics. This essentially means that the light from the LED is being manipulated by a lens, directing it where you need it—onto the shelves—making sure you can read the items on the top shelf and your toddler can grab the items on the bottom shelf.
At this point, your customer might be tired enough from shopping to head to the in-store coffee-bar to take a break, so this area should be very comfortable and welcoming. The staff, however, are dealing with boiling water and steam, so they need enough light to do their work safely and without injury. The balance here is as key as not burning the grind for your espresso.
Once recharged, you, the shopper, now need to exit—but not before paying and packing up all your items. The promotional stands on the way to the cashiers are meant to grab your (deflating) attention – and they do this with bright colours, and extra signage, and narrow-focused light. These lights can be permanently installed and always aiming at some promotion, or the store needs to be able to adjust or re-position them without too much hassle. Product specification is key here.
The check-out aisle is busy, it’s month-end, everyone is getting groceries, and you can’t wait to get home, cook dinner, do laundry, and bathe the dog. #NotReally. The store tempts you with treats, and you start thinking “I really deserve a chocolate”. These small item displays are not accidentally called “impulse displays”. The lighting needs to be bright over the cashiers on your right, and bright on the promotional stands on your left, but you want to close your eyes and take a breath. Lighting design in this part of the store is all about positioning; making sure you can see that slab of Cadbury’s you want, but gently. Standing in the queue with a full trolley and sore feet, you give in.
The cashiers are, by SANS regulation, supposed to be working in 500 lux. This is as bright as required by lecture halls or rooms for medical attention. It’s the last stretch and just as bright light can help you wake up in the morning, the brighter light here not only allows accurate cash-counting and safe item-bagging, but you finish the shopping experience on a relative high, and smiling at your cashier and security guard, you can head to the comforts of home.
*It’s 300 lux, by the way.
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