The longest week of my
retail life was at Christmas a few years ago. I was managing a food and non-food superstore in the
Midlands. The strategy for this most important season had been set a few months
before at a Christmas conference where store general managers were reminded of
the fact that 40% of the year’s sales depended on the October to December
period. We were informed that
product availability, especially fresh food, would be second to none, more than
ample to meet demand.
This was big business
for fresh turkeys, vegetables, hams, meat, pork pies, dips, salads, cheeses and
all the rest of it, so to miss out on sales by not getting the supply and
distribution chains right would be close to disaster for the profit and loss
account.
But what happened in
the course of the big week leading up to Christmas was challenging, frightening
and, in some ways, potentially dangerous.
The buyers had bought
enormous quantities of fresh food. The directors had signed off the plan. The
store managers had to manage at best and cope at worst with increased
deliveries of pallets and pallets and pallets of fresh food, before more and
more pallets arrived.
The rules of fresh food
handling dictated that we had to receive the delivery and have it checked and
refrigerated in chilled conditions within an hour at most, but twenty minutes
was the ideal target. Even Tom
Cruise would have found that mission impossible. But, and if ever a subject deserved to be in a book called
“Retail Confidential”, I can reveal that huge quantities of fresh food did not
see refrigeration storage for days.
Luckily, the weather
was on our side. Outside in the warehouse yard, it was bitterly cold and so, I
suppose, by default, we complied with chilled conditions. But the fact of the matter was that the
amount of food sent to us, predetermined by buyers and merchandisers, far outweighed
our storage capacity on the premises.
On our daily Christmas
conference call, store managers voiced concern about the avalanche of food
arriving several times each day.
On one of the calls, the Chief Executive of the company brushed our
concerns aside and told us that our top priority this Christmas was to maintain
availability of all fresh food products to closing time on Christmas Eve. He seemed unconcerned about the
mountains of food being stored in supermarket yards across the country for
upwards of forty-eight hours.
The general public had
no idea.
All across the UK,
delivery areas of supermarkets were choked full of product that belonged in
properly refrigerated storage. We
had to manage the situation as best we could and we did, with flying colours,
if flying by the seat of our pants was a legitimate way of working.
We got away with it
because of the weather but it taught me a few lessons about sales pressure and
the ability of some senior people in retailing to turn a blind eye to practical
problems, preferring to concentrate on the balance sheet above and beyond
customer safety and care sometimes.
Let the customer beware
of what goes on behind the scenes.
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