Being out of critical items could lose customers
From the desk of Tom Boyer, director of national accounts
Never Outs® are just like they sound — items that should never be out of stock. HRG’s proprietary Never Outs list is part of the monthly delivery of the TEMPS® Category Manager program. Each month this list of items in the featured categories is delivered to TEMPS customers, giving them a handy reference of the top-selling items in each subcategory. These high-demand items are included in every planogram size because they are the best-selling products in each subcategory. Consequently, even if you are out of stock on only a few of these items, or for just a few days, you can adversely affect your sales and even your customer base.
Preventing out-of-stocks should be a high priority, especially with these products. Reordering after a stock is depleted is too late. If a customer comes in looking for the item and it isn’t there they’ll most likely go elsewhere to get it and may never come back because they’ll think that they can’t reliably find the product on your shelves.
An easy way of preventing out-of-stocks of these highly-productive items is to transfer the information from the Never Outs list to the shelf labels in the department. Identify each item on the list by placing a type of marker, such as a red dot, on its shelf sticker. By doing so, your front-end manager or any employee, really, can tell at a glance when it’s time to reorder.
I highly recommend you establish processes or assign responsibility for monitoring Never Outs in your front-end. Maintaining stock of these products:
- prevents profit-reducing out-of-stocks,
- ensures what your customers want is always available, and
- are so important to the department that you should never be out of them.
Be sure your shelves are set for maximum profitability. Contact us if you’d like more information on our TEMPS program or a better understanding of our exclusive Never Outs list.