This is an issue that's been plaguing our district(assuming everywhere) since the new year especially. All of the new resets are limiting our shelf space to as minimal as possible, making it literally impossible to keep fast moving product in the shelf. Most of all of our gatorades are now allocated 10, pack 12. People don't buy 1 non-chilled gatorade, they buy lots. A couple of people come in and the product is gone for the rest of the day. Product is on store choice side of the lobby to help, but people bypass that and go straight for the shelf as it's on the other side of the store. With each reset making new products like this, there simply isn't the space or hours to deal with it. If it were just one or two items you could make permanent fixtures, but since it's a whole boat load, things just don't work out. Especially without a daytime replenisher. Every conference call is the same, "We are not meeting our OOS, THIS HAS TO CHANGE OR ELSE!" You constantly hear contradictory statements like, "You don't have time to have significant backstock, ELMS doesn't give the hours for that" But at the same time you're being forced into it because of how little holding power they have on the shelf. Literally the entire district is red on OOS now with maybe 2 of the stores making it a couple of days a week. Ours being the best and we make it 4-5 days at most but it's getting more and more difficult to do so.
This is not limited to dry grocery, in frozen the fastest moving products have been moved down to 1 row. Kroger ice cream bars? 1 row, vertical, on a 4 foot corner space allowing for allocation 7. Same with original bomb pops, making all of the fastest moving kroger ice cream 8 allocation vs. the old 12 and a whole host of other items. I haven't really looked at dairy but I can only assume it's not as much of an issue since there is a day crew replenishing.
Is this becoming a bigger issue for everyone else?
Yes. They are trying to cram in new varieties of everything, and some products have been brought down to one facing that really shouldn't be. The shelves don't grow.
Yes, I have noticed facings getting smaller for the last two years.
My understanding is: There is supposed to be someone in Grocery during the day to replenish the shelf based on the Primetime scan. My experience from the last three years is they only cover holes(with anything within arms reach) and do not go look for anything on backstock carts. I put the fast movers on the top of the Uboat and daycrew still will not get it.
Nightcrew is supposed to have time to run backstock daily. Some of the aisles are time consuming to run if the Uboat is overfilled. I do not have time to run the stock and backstock and condition on double truck nights. But, when I am putting my residual backstock away, I will replenish items that I know are low and very fast movers.
Example of how Daycrew replenishes: Delmonte is $1.89. RedGold that is packed on the endcap is about 40 feet away. It goes where the 99 cent tags are. There were atleast 2 cases each on the shelf before I left at 7am.
-- Edited by Anonymouse1 on Wednesday 29th of April 2015 07:20:38 AM
-- Edited by Anonymouse1 on Wednesday 29th of April 2015 07:23:49 AM
Today they literally wiped 90% of the gatorade out, it was packed out when we left in the morning. No replenishing, most of it we had in the back. The shelves were literally so bare you could crawl up inside them and take a nap.
I've been complaining about this for a long time and the only constructive info I've been told is that they derive the new allocations when doing resets based on store movement. Which from experience doing frozen is absolute BS.
I just reallocate the shelves myself as I see fit. The people who do the resets don't even change the allocation/min data anyway, so why bother with their terrible setup.
Of course, I'm speaking for frozen freight. Doing so for dry grocery would be too much of a hassle because of the shelf strips and price tags being sticky.
They've now started auto-changing the allocations of reset areas when the first new items begin to ship. Problem being they aren't changing the minimums. So, for example kraft bbq sauce, was allocation 70, cut back to 20 but the minimum was still set high. Unless you're being extremely proactive by shooting the entire areas where the new resets are coming in and adjusting the minimums, you're going to be dealing with a lot of excess product when the reset happens.
This is a HUGE issue at my store in both grocery and frozen. We have entire sets where nothing has two facings with a pack size of twice the allocation. Every time the product comes in we're stuck with at least half a case of backstock, generally more. We didn't used to need a permanent slow mover pallet, now we do. Water and the cold beverage cases have also been hit by it, and now a lot of fast movers have lost up to 50% of their allocation, it's really unfortunate.
To me it doesn't make a lot of sense. We haven't gained any labor time during the day, which is when the replenishment of these items needs to be done because they aren't going to sell when night crew is there. Some people are just blindly raising minimums without thinking about why the products are actually going out of stock (low allocation), resulting in a ton of unnecessary freight coming in. I can't tell you how many times I've had to throw whole cases into backstock because the allocation is only a couple higher than 2. Result is that our water backstock is almost equal to half of dry grocery.
They've now started auto-changing the allocations of reset areas when the first new items begin to ship. Problem being they aren't changing the minimums. So, for example kraft bbq sauce, was allocation 70, cut back to 20 but the minimum was still set high. Unless you're being extremely proactive by shooting the entire areas where the new resets are coming in and adjusting the minimums, you're going to be dealing with a lot of excess product when the reset happens.
You definitely do need to be very proactive about resets. If you're the order writer I recommend printing off the list of upcoming KOMPASS resets every week and either using the increase/decrease function on those commodities (only works well at larger stores) or manually trimming those sets. After they get reset scan everything and fix it. Tedious, but necessary.
Yep, we're manually shooting everything in the reset areas. Bad thing about it, there was no warning that this was happening. We kind of just randomly found an item where that had happen while scanning lows/holes and deduced it ourselves. That's definitely a communication that would be extremely useful had they sent a quick e-mail about it.
A big thing here too since we're a smaller store, even though items may still be 1 row in the new reset, that does not mean the allocation is the same. Particularly in frozen, the current set may have room for 1 or 2 horizontal bottom layers, the new set may reduce the shelf height allowing none. I found that to be particularly true with the healthy choice reset. Everything on our top shelf had 2 bottom layers, and everything on the bottom had more as well. All of those allocations changed to allow no bottoms, thus decreasing the allocations/minimums by 6. Now all minimums are set at 2, which means you have to be a lot more diligent on orders to bring in a case, which also is against best practices. Everything is so contradictory it's crazy. That's the most frustrating part.
-- Edited by DeltaGrocery on Saturday 2nd of May 2015 03:27:10 PM
Our bomb pops all have two rows. They actually expanded on our novelty section, so that's fine in my store. what they reduced though was the hotpocket section.
There will a Lean Cuisine and a Healthy Choice reset coming.. so get ready for rows being cut to make room for addition **** that isn't going to sell until it's 1.88 10 months from now :/.
We're getting our dinner reset this week. Lots of new Healthy choice, lean cuisine, smart ones. However we have them on sale starting this week with the marie calendars. All of the healthy choices have been cut down to allocation 10. Hooray for tons of backstock.
