Bing Lee’s ticketing process was based on centrally printing promotional material and sending it to stores. Because there was no way to identify specific-store inventories, every store received an exhaustive database of all products and all price changes.

Stores were then required to print everything, sort through the tickets to pick out what was relevant to them, and discard the rest. The time-consuming, wasteful process left staff less time to help customers.  To prepare for larger sales promotions, more staff working longer hours were needed to complete the significant in-store labour required.

Another challenge for Bing Lee was keeping up with missing or incorrect tickets. These mistakes could only be discovered one by one – sometimes by frustrated customers – and then required staff to write down corrected product information and manually enter all the details into the system. Then they’d have to print it and physically replace the shelf ticket. 

As the store network grew, the negative impact of this  inefficient, unscalable, outdated process grew with it.