When it comes to checkout-free concession stands, we like to look at the stadium with the most stands — Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas — when it comes to trying to assess trends. Thanks to the Las Vegas Raiders and to Zippin, we have some top-line statistics from the 2023 NFL regular season games at Allegiant to share, starting with a total of approximately 100,000 items sold across the 10 stores during Raiders home games.
As a whole, checkout-free concession stands have become very popular both with venues and with fans, mainly for their ability to let fans get food and drink in a much faster fashion than traditional belly-up concession stands. And while we’ve seen tremendous growth in checkout-free stands at stadiums over the past couple years (which is continuing this calendar year), it’s often hard to get any hard statistics on usage mainly due to the complex financial arrangements between teams, caterers, venues and technology suppliers.
But here are some figures (see infographic) that give you a top-line view of why checkout-free technology has become so popular at stadiums: Across the Raiders’ 2023 home game schedule, the Zippin-powered stores at Allegiant Stadium saw approximately 50,000 total shoppers, with 21.4 percent of those being repeat customers. Given that most of the Raiders’ Zippin stores are of the “drink lane” variety where shoppers pass by coolers and shelves in a straight line, those numbers become even more interesting since they represent transactions at almost completely new spots in the stadium, some in previously empty concourse space.
According to the statistics provided to us, the overall average transaction time per customer was 42 seconds. We find that number very credible, since when we visited Allegiant Stadium for a Raiders’ home game last September, we took out the stopwatch and saw many transaction times right in the same ballpark, including one transaction that took only 21 seconds, from entry to exit.
With approximately 100,000 items sold, it’s clear that fans at Raiders home games this past season found out that one of the fastest paths to food and drink was to visit a checkout-free concession stand. Thanks to the Raiders and to Zippin for the insights.
