Predictions, shelf life, and yogurt....

I got an oppurtunity to order everything for dairy/frozen for an entire week at my grocery store. I order fairly often, but an entire week straight was definitely new. Almost everything that we sell. I was in charge of making sure that it was in stock. Fairly easy, right? Just look at what's almost empty and order it. WRONG!

What many people don't realize is that it is incredibly difficult to predict what you, the customer, is going to buy on a given day or week. I found out that on Friday, peach yogurt might sell a case (12 cups) in one afternoon. Then on Saturday, maybe no one would buy it.

And to make matters worse, there are sales. This week, it was our generic brand yogurt at an extremely ridiculous price. I ordered to fill the shelf up, then ordered a few cases for the display, which was completely full at the time. The next day, when the truck came in, I found that the shelf was empty and the display was down to a third of its size. This created an awkward situation where we were out of a sale item (big problem) and had to call other stores in our chain to see if they had some to give. And nobody had any for me at all.

Couple this with the variety of products that customers buy make it very hard to figure out what to order and what will sell. In addition, I am a conservative orderer, which means I tend to run things close to empty before I'll order them. That's becomes a problem when I let a popular item run down. People will buy it up after I order and we are out, without anything coming in to replace it.

And finally, add in the relatively quick shelf life of dairy products and you have a very interesting week. I had quite a few OSs (Out of Stocks), which was only made worse by a mass recall of a certain sour cream. There were holes in the shelves everywhere. And it's all the customer's fault.

I am learning what sells, but still will be extremely happy to hand back control to my manager in a few more days.