Skyfii, which offers analytics and marketing software for brick-and-mortar businesses, says interest in its people-counting product more than doubled in April, compared with the same month in 2019. Systems like Skyfii’s help create lines, by telling building managers when it’s safe for people to enter. CEO Wayne Arthur says he also hopes it fights them. “We’re hoping the software might alleviate people’s concern around, ‘Well, how long is this going to be?’ It’s frustrating when you don’t know any better.”
Retail stores, offices, restaurants, and bars have always had occupancy limits. But in general, businesses want people in them. The more people eating food, sipping Negronis, and picking out sweaters, the more money. Now, social distancing guidelines attempt to prevent the spread of the virus by maintaining 6-foot buffers between patrons. In Chicago, which entered into its Phase 3 “cautiously reopen” stage earlier this month, indoor nonessential retailers are limited to 25 percent of their normal capacity, while essential ones can creep up to 50 percent. Kansas City salons can operate at 50 percent, with 6 feet of separation.
Discount chain HomeBuys, which has six locations in Ohio and Kentucky, usually permits 600 customers to hunt through its 80,000-square-foot stores for good deals. Now, says company network administrator Jorge Alexandres, only 80 can enter at a time. At one point during the pandemic, it used staffers to man the door. Now it uses a people-counter system mounted to its threshold, which sends alerts to managers’ phones when the store is getting too full.
In some ways, the six-month-old Jefferson Bodega had terrible timing. The San Antonio convenience store opened just before the pandemic reached Texas, and now the corner spot stocked with beer, snacks, and an international candy assortment allows only 11 people in a space built for 22. The bodega uses a people-counting set-up from a San Francisco-based company called Density to make sure only so many people enter at once. Owners Luke and Lisa Horgan have backgrounds in media and tech, and also like to geek out on the software’s analytics.
Generally, lines to enter the bodega aren’t bad—only about five minutes on busy periods during the weekends, says Luke Horgan. He likes to think about it this way: “People waiting at the door are decreasing the traffic at the register.” In other words: We’re always waiting.
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