Sunday and public holiday opening: how to avoid empty shelves with no delivery?

Three handicaps on the same day

Most out-of-stocks are born in store, 72% according to Corsten and Gruen, and are fixed by ordering and replenishment. On Sundays and public holidays, both levers are weakened at once:

• no delivery: neither the warehouse nor direct-delivery suppliers come (direct store delivery);
• a reduced team: often one till, one or two shelf employees, a duty manager (the evening duty manager);
• shelves already eaten into: Sunday follows Saturday, a public holiday follows the day before a celebration, the biggest sales days (Saturday and pre-holiday out-of-stocks).

What is missing on Sunday at 10 am will be missing until Monday, or until Tuesday if the holiday falls on a Monday.

Everything is decided beforehand

1. Order for the right duration

Friday’s order does not cover two days of sales but three: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning until the delivery. For a public holiday attached to a weekend, four. Automatic ordering parameters do not know this; it is a manual correction on the SKUs that count (automatic ordering and out-of-stocks).

2. An identified buffer stock

On the thirty products that sell most on Sunday (bread, pastries, milk, eggs, drinks, fresh products for the meal), a back-room stock marked “Sunday”, not to be put out on Saturday. Without that label, it goes on Saturday afternoon (organising the back room).

3. Saturday’s last replenishment

The Saturday end-of-day pass is made for Sunday morning: it fills the shelves that will sell tomorrow, not the ones that sold today. The two lists are not the same (organise replenishment).

4. A short list for the reduced team

A team of two or three cannot hold the whole store. It gets a list: the thirty products to watch, where the buffer stock is, the times of the two passes. Everything else waits until Monday.

The special case of fresh

On short-dated products, ordering for three days increases waste. The trade-off is the one described in fresh aisle: reduce out-of-stocks without increasing waste: on products with one or two days of life, accepting the Sunday afternoon out-of-stock is sometimes better than Monday’s waste. On the rest of fresh, the cold-room buffer stock makes the difference.

Monday morning

Monday is the day the store is emptiest and the team busiest with the delivery. Three actions, in this order:

1. record what was missing on Sunday, before filling: it is the only trace, and it feeds the following Friday’s order;
2. fill everyday products first, not in the order the pallets arrive;
3. correct the quantities of the next Friday order on the SKUs recorded.

Moment	What gets decided
Friday, ordering	three days of sales on key SKUs, not two
Saturday, receiving	“Sunday” buffer stock set aside in the back room
Saturday, 6 pm	last replenishment planned for Sunday morning
Sunday	short list, two passes, buffer stock
Monday morning	record what was missing, before filling

A worked example (hypothetical)

Take a fictional supermarket open on Sunday mornings. A count made four Sundays running at 11 am finds on average 22 SKUs absent among the 100 that sell most that day, nearly all of them already empty at Saturday closing. The store orders on Friday for three days on those SKUs, sets aside a buffer stock and shifts Saturday’s last replenishment. The expected scenario is Sunday-morning absences divided by two or three. The figures are illustrative.

What shopper reporting changes

On Sunday nobody has time to run a count. Shoppers who report a missing product with ShelfAlert do it for the team: on Monday morning the list of what was missing already exists, with the times, and the following Friday’s order can be corrected on facts. 14-day trial, no payment card: see the plan for store managers.

Sources

• Corsten, Gruen, “On Shelf Availability”, 2004: summary.
• Gruen, Corsten, Bharadwaj, “Retail Out-of-Stocks: A Worldwide Examination”, GMA, 2002: full study (PDF).