How Mike's Liquor Lifted Average Ticket With Remi

After several months running Remi on a single tablet near the back wall, Mike's Liquor in San Diego, CA saw average ticket move up meaningfully. No new staff. No new POS. Same product mix.

The store

Mike's Liquor is an independently owned liquor store in San Diego, CA. The shop has been in the family for years and serves a mix of regulars who know exactly what they want and walk-ins who don't. The catalog runs into the thousands of SKUs across spirits, wine, and beer, with a rotating set of allocated bottles and seasonal stock that shifts every few weeks.

Like most independent liquor stores, the shop runs lean. On a busy Friday there might be two people on the floor — one ringing the register, one restocking. When a customer walks in asking "what pairs with this steak?" or "I want something like Buffalo Trace but cheaper," the staff either drop what they're doing to help, or the customer wanders out without buying.

The problem

The pattern was consistent before Remi:

• Walk-ins asking for recommendations got short answers because the register line was backed up.
• Spanish-speaking customers — a meaningful share of the foot traffic — often didn't ask at all.
• Cross-sell on mixers, bitters, glassware, and snacks happened only when staff had time, which was rarely.
• New hires took weeks to learn the catalog well enough to recommend confidently. Until then, they defaulted to "I'll go grab the manager."

The result wasn't dramatic. It was just a steady leak. Customers came in for one bottle, found it themselves, and left. Average ticket sat flat and didn't move.

How they deployed Remi

Setup took about an afternoon.

1. The Remi tablet arrived pre-configured. The owner scanned the activation QR code, which paired the device to the store account.
2. The product catalog was uploaded via CSV. The store already kept a spreadsheet for inventory, so the import was mostly a matter of mapping columns.
3. The owner customized Remi's greeting and persona — a short, friendly opening in English and Spanish that mentions the store by name and asks what the customer is shopping for.
4. The tablet was mounted on a small stand near the spirits aisle, with a clear sign: "Ask Remi for recommendations."

That was it. No POS integration, no register changes, no retraining the team.

What changed

After several months running:

• Average ticket moved up materially over the baseline period
• Spanish-language interactions accounted for a meaningful share of total Remi conversations
• Staff reported fewer "what should I get?" interruptions while ringing
• New hires used Remi as a training tool — they'd watch how it answered and pick up product knowledge on the side

The lift wasn't from one big thing. It was from Remi consistently surfacing the bottle that pairs with what the customer is already buying, suggesting a mixer when someone bought tequila, and recommending a comparable bottle when the one they wanted was out of stock.

A few patterns worth flagging from the deployment so far:

• Pairing questions converted best. When a customer asked Remi what to pair with a specific dish or occasion, attach rates on a second item (mixer, garnish, or accompanying bottle) ran significantly higher than baseline.
• Out-of-stock saves were quietly meaningful. When the bottle a customer wanted wasn't on the shelf, Remi suggested a comparable bottle in the same price band. Those conversations recovered trips that would have walked out empty-handed.
• Spanish-language conversations stuck. The bilingual greeting was not just a nice-to-have — a measurable share of total interactions happened in Spanish, and those customers converted at a similar rate to English-language interactions.
• Staff time recovered, not redirected. The team didn't suddenly have time for new tasks. They just stopped getting interrupted at the register, which made the rest of the shift run cleaner.

The owner also kept an eye on whether Remi was steering customers toward higher-margin SKUs in a way that felt inauthentic. The answer was no — Remi recommended based on the customer's stated preference and price band, not based on margin. That mattered to the team because the store's word-of-mouth depends on customers feeling like they got an honest recommendation.

What's next

The owner is looking at adding Remi to a second location and turning on the SMS receipt feature so customers can opt in for restock alerts on the bottles they ask about. The plan is to keep the deployment minimal and let the data on average ticket drive any further investment.

The team is also experimenting with Remi's persona — the opening greeting and follow-up tone — to see if a slightly more conversational style increases the share of customers who keep talking past the first question. The current persona is friendly and brief; the test variant adds a little more warmth and store-specific personality.

If you run a liquor store and the pattern above sounds familiar, the shortest path is to see Remi in action. Book a demo, browse the liquor stores solution page, or check pricing.