🔨 Every charging location looks like a nail when you only have a hammer in your toolkit.
⚒️ Let me say this upfront: we need the hammer. What i call the industrialisation of charging is not optional, it is mandatory. And still, too often, they are missing. Without them, we cannot reach the reliability, availability and pricing that drivers need to build trust.
But that hammer has to be built from the customer’s perspective, not the supplier’s. And once you do that, one hammer for everything stops making sense.
Two examples
🪑At an IKEA location, old triple chargers were recently removed. Immediately the debate started: 50 kW or 150 kW, given only four parking spots?
🛒 A german supermarket chain has begun installing 300 kW fast charger at selected locations in front of their stores.
In both cases I keep asking the same question. Not ‚what is technically possible here?‘ but ‚what does the customer actually want to do here?‘
There are two fundamentally different situations
🛣️ Journey Charging: I have to stop because without charging I won’t reach my destination. Fast charger is almost always right here, because the goal is to minimise active charging time.
☕ Destination Charging: I want to stop because I have something else to do, and my battery level is not the reason I came. Yet the opposite is not automatically right so slow AC at 11 or 22 kW is not the default answer. It’s about dwell time.
This is where it gets strategic. For most retailers the questions are:
🚗 Is charging a standalone business that happens to have my shop next door? Someone who comes to charge might also shop.
🛍️ Or is it an amenity that strengthens my core business? Someone who comes to shop might also charge.
Both at once is not a strategy, it’s a plan without a direction.
🕯️A retailer lives from sales, not from charging sessions. An IKEA visit takes at least 60 minutes, and nobody drives to IKEA to charge and then thinks, well, might as well grab a Billy shelf while I’m charging. If you put the wrong chargers there the car finishes charging before the owner finishing shopping, blocks the spot, leaves earlier or doesn’t plug in at all because they know it’ll be done too fast. Charging then does not support the core business. It ignores it.
🔋 Shoppers seldomly arrive with a low battery. They don’t have to charge, they just need a top up. That means less energy per session, poor utilisation, and an charging investment that simply doesn’t add up. The charger is too fast for the customer and state of charge of the car.
The right tool doesn’t start with the question which charger to install. It starts with the question why your customer comes to you in the first place.
Hammer and Nails
