Saturday and pre-holiday out-of-stocks: how to prepare?

Why those days are different

On a Saturday or the day before a holiday, the store does in one day what it does in two or three ordinary days, and on a narrower range: traffic drivers, festive products, meal basics. Three things change at once:

• hourly sales of traffic drivers double or triple;
• the team is busy at the tills and the desk, less available for the aisles;
• the shopper is in a hurry, with a complete basket to finish: an out-of-stock on a central product loses several items, or the whole basket.

The ECR France / IRI barometers confirm it at the scale of tense periods: the first quarter of 2022, marked by supply tensions, reached the highest out-of-stock rate observed in five years, with €333 million of lost sales over the quarter. In the UK, Retail Economics and DHL estimate that one grocery trip in five includes an out-of-stock item. The mechanism is the same at the scale of a peak day.

The three classic mistakes

1. Ordering on the average. An order calculated on the week’s average sales is a third to half short for Saturday. Order on the sales of the same day, in the same period, of the previous year, adjusted for trend.
2. Keeping morning-only replenishment. The shelf is full at 9 am and empty at 2 pm. Without a daytime pass, the out-of-stock lasts all afternoon, when the store is fullest.
3. Discovering phantom stock on the day. A festive product with wrong book stock will not be reordered: it is missing on Saturday, and nobody understands why when the system says it is there.

The four-step plan

One week before

List the fifty traffic drivers of the day (meal basics, festive products, leaflet promotions). For each: last year’s sales for the same day, book stock, facing capacity. Order to cover expected sales plus a 20% margin.

The day before

Physically count the fifty traffic drivers, correct wrong book stocks, and prepare replenishment pallets in the back room by aisle, in the order of the passes. Set the facings of festive products to expected sales, even if it means temporarily shrinking slow references (facing and shelf capacity by sales velocity).

On the day

Three replenishment passes instead of one: opening, early afternoon (1 pm to 2 pm), late afternoon (5 pm to 6 pm). One person dedicated to gap detection on traffic drivers between passes, with a list and a way to fill it live. The organisation is detailed in how to organise replenishment to avoid gaps on the shelf.

The day after

Record which products were missing, at what time, for how long. That is the basis of the order for the next peak day. Without this record, the same out-of-stocks happen again the following Saturday.

What it brings

On a €120,000 turnover day, an out-of-stock rate rising from 6% to 10% in the afternoon represents, with a real loss of 55% of missed sales, more than €2,500 lost on the half-day alone, and shoppers gone to the competitor with their shopping list. The plan above costs a few hours of preparation and two replenishment passes.

What shopper reporting changes

On Saturday, the team has no time for walks; the shoppers are everywhere in the store. With ShelfAlert, every shopper who finds a gap reports it in two seconds, and the alert reaches the person in charge of replenishment: the list of gaps fills itself live, without a walk. 14-day trial, no payment card: see the plan for store managers.

Sources

• ECR France / IRI out-of-stock barometer, Les Marchés, May 2022.
• Retail Economics and DHL, The availability effect report 2026.
• Gruen, Corsten, Bharadwaj, “Retail Out-of-Stocks: A Worldwide Examination”, GMA, 2002 (shopper reactions to an out-of-stock): full study (PDF).