by Barb G. for our “99 Ways to Make a Positive Difference in Your Pharmacy” blog series

When you have friends and family over, do you make sure your house is “mother-in-law clean?” Over the years, your customers have come to be family, so why wouldn’t you do the same for them?

When you enter your store tomorrow, take a look at your HBW departments. Would you be proud or embarrassed if your mother-in-law came in?

If you would be embarrassed, assign the task of dusting your shelves and products once a week to one or more of your staff members. It may have to be more often if your shelves tend to collect dust quickly. If you don’t dust, you are portraying the wrong image to your customers. You don’t want them to think you are stocking old products. Put yourself in their shoes. Would you want to purchase a medicine or treatment, especially one that is ingested or topical, that’s covered with dust?

Assign staff members to completely clear the shelves of one or two departments and wipe them down each month. This allows the opportunity to make sure older product is placed in front to sell first and to check expiration dates. Shopworn products should be removed, marked down, and put in a separate section. Expired products should be returned based on your wholesaler’s return policy.

Do you subscribe to a front-end management program? Resetting a department based on the planogram allows you to make sure you have the best-selling products on your shelves arranged the way your customers shop. As you receive updated planograms, be sure to update that month’s departments to give a fresh look to your store.

After doing this for a month or two, take another look at your shelves. Would your mother-in-law be proud of you?

As a client services representative, Barb supports both internal and external clients and is one of the first points of contact for both. She is a liaison between healthcare distributor clients, retail clients, manufacturers, and POS vendors.