Wherever the Tall Guy Left It

A Survey of Floor Staff Wayfinding Heuristics Against a Supermarket Chain's Planogram-Reset Compliance Score

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement surveys 612 floor staff across 34 stores of a national supermarket chain, finding the chain's own planogram-reset compliance score explains almost none of the variance in staff self-rated confidence finding items for a customer (r = 0.09, R² = 0.008), while tenure explains substantially more; staff report navigating by landmark products and carried-over spatial memory far more often than by the compliance score itself, which they name least often of six heuristics.

@misc{slop_efc5ec,
  author       = {Sten Okwuosa and Thandiwe Solberg and Ingeborg Nwachukwu},
  title        = {Wherever the Tall Guy Left It: A Survey of Floor Staff Wayfinding Heuristics Against a Supermarket Chain's Planogram-Reset Compliance Score},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.efc5ec},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-supermarket-chain-efc5ec/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}