Availability problems explode
Reading a recipe involving a new product, Gunpowder Potatoes, in the Waitrose excellent weekly newspaper Weekend sufficiently piqued my interest that I went in search of the tasty-sounding Indian-spiced spuds.
Visits to major Waitrose branches at King’s Cross, The Brunswick Centre, Holloway Road and on Oxford Street in the John Lewis store simply threw up empty shelving where the product should have been.
Having been convinced by a Waitrose person on X (formerly Twitter) that I’d maybe been unfortunate because the system showed it was in stock at these locations I ventured back to The Brunswick Centre. Sadly, it was the same story and I left without the required spuds.
This is clearly a single example of a stock-out based on my personal experience with one product – that I’m told is popular – but a lack of availability is blighting the retail sector, according to recent research from OC&C, with retailers losing lots of sales. It has found 45% of customers have said they ended up shopping elsewhere for items when their first port of call didn’t appear to have what they wanted in stock.
Maybe Waitrose’s confidence in the product being available in these branches was misplaced. OC&C has concluded that many retailers are partially-sighted about the issue of availability as their historic metrics are providing false assurances. The bottom line is they often don’t seem to know where their goods are in the supply chain. OC&C has found some retailers standing proudly behind availability of over 95% but in reality on the shop floor it could easily be as much as 10% lower.
Between my many visits to Waitrose branches in London I managed to find the time to venture up to Belsize Park for a look at the impressive Kavanagh’s food store. This independent uses Electronic Shelf Edge Labels (ESLs) throughout the store and in its ambient grocery aisles it links them up with shelf-edge cameras in what it calls a 360-degree store system from VusionGroup.
Each camera can monitor three bays in the aisles in order to identify stock-outs. This is fed back into the system and the manager of the store Kelman Mezei can even look up on his phone every hour to see which items need restocking. Having been deployed over the past 18 months he assures me that availability has increased from an already impressive 93% to a mighty 96/97%. And this is translating directly into boosted sales.
Admittedly this is a single store – although the owners are investigating rolling the technology out to its other outlets – but it highlights how technology can be deployed in-store to boost the sadly all too often poor availability shoppers face in grocery stores.
Unfortunately, even if Waitrose were to wave a wand over its estate and install such kit I feel my appetite for Gunpowder potatoes has been shot to pieces.
Glynn Davis, editor, Retail Insider