Nothing is straightforward…
September 2, 2009
In my last missive I suggested that to get rid of dead stock all you had to do was identify slow moving items that returned a low profit and cull them from your inventory – if only life were that simple. I’ll give you a hypothetical scenario; supposing you were a jeweller who managed to obtain a number of Faberge eggs for £100,000 each. Due to the recession you know you can’t sell them for more than you bought them for and anyway, no one has that money to spend. The question is, what do you do? The answer – nothing. You have become known for having Faberge eggs on display, so people come into your store to look at the eggs and end up buying some jewellery anyway. You have now created a USP and become whats known as a destination store and your dead stock has become an asset.
What this illustrates is the need to know not only your stock but your customer also. Your customer may expect you to have a certain item in stock even if they only buy it once in a blue moon, it becomes something more than just stock, it becomes like a security blanket – ‘if X has Y in stock then all is well with the world’.
