Drop a slow product line, or keep the shelf?

A whole line is worth keeping only if it earns close to what the rest of your shelf earns, or if it pulls in people who buy other things too. Measure both before you decide anything. And if you do drop it, run it down slowly and tell your regulars while there are still goods on the shelf.

Why this corner sits undecided for years

It is ten past six and Anwar has come in for a school notebook and a glue stick. Rs 90, and he is out of the door in two minutes. While you are reaching for the glue stick you are looking past him at six feet of stationery: registers, pencil boxes, a rack of pens, a bundle of chart paper leaning in the same spot for years.

The shelf is not dead. It sells. Something goes out of it most days. That is exactly why you have not decided anything about it for years.

Dropping one item that never moves is easy. You stop reordering it, nobody notices. A whole line is a different animal. It has a history, usually longer than yours. Your father put that rack in. There is a supplier who has drunk tea on your stool for a decade and who asks about your family before he asks about your order. And there are four or five households who walk past two other shops to come to you for exactly that thing.

So the question never gets asked out loud. It gets postponed, one order at a time, and the postponing looks like loyalty.

It is not loyalty. It is that you do not have the one number that would settle it.

The number that ends the argument

Your shelf is the only thing in your shop you cannot get more of. Money you can borrow. Hours you can stretch. Feet of shelf are fixed, and every foot is either earning what the rest of your shop earns or it is being carried by the rest of your shop.

So measure the line the way you would measure a tenant. Four numbers, all four in ten minutes with a measuring tape and your ordering record.

How many feet of shelf does the line take? How much of your money is standing in its stock, at your buy rate? How much of that stock leaves in one month, at your buy rate? And what does the corner earn you in a month, once the buy rate is taken off?

Then do the same four for the whole shop.

Say: one slow line, measured against the whole shop

Shelf the line takes up6 feet of 30

Your money standing in its stock, at buy rateRs 48,000

What leaves that corner in a month, at buy rateRs 6,500

So the corner is holdingabout 7 months of stock

What the corner earns in a month, after buy rateRs 2,400

The corner, per foot of shelf, per monthRs 400

The whole shop, per foot of shelf, per monthRs 800

The whole shop is holding, in stockabout 6 weeks

Those same six feet, at the shop's own rate, would earnRs 4,800, not Rs 2,400

Example numbers, not a survey. Put your own corner in: feet, money standing, months held, and earning in a month.

Read the last few lines slowly. The corner is a fifth of the shelf and a third of the money, and it earns half of what a foot of that shop earns. It is also holding about seven months of stock while the shop holds about six weeks overall. The money in it comes back five times more slowly than the money everywhere else, and that, not the earning, is usually the real damage.

Take the line out of the shop's own average and it gets sharper. The other twenty four feet earn Rs 21,600 a month, which is Rs 900 a foot, not Rs 800.

One honest warning, because this sum can be used to prove anything. Rs 800 a foot is what your existing shelf earns, not a promise that whatever replaces the line will earn it. New goods take time to find their customers, and a fresh corner can easily do Rs 300 a foot at first. Compare the line to what you would really put there, not to a perfect shop.

"It brings people in" is often true, so test it

Every shopkeeper defends a slow corner with the same sentence: people come for that, and while they are here they buy other things. Half the time it is a habit dressed up as a reason. The other half it is completely true, and shopkeepers who drop the line anyway lose far more than the shelf was costing them. There is no way to know which one you are without looking, and looking is cheap.

Put a slip of paper by the till for two full weeks.

The two-week slip that settles the footfall argument

• One line every time somebody buys from that corner
• What else was in the same basket, and roughly what it came to
• Nothing else. No names, no reasons. It has to survive a busy evening
• Two full weeks, quiet days as well as busy ones
• Then two piles: bought only the line, or bought the line and groceries

At the end you count two piles. How many bought from that corner and nothing else, and how many bought from the corner and from the rest of the shop in the same basket.

If most of them bought only from the line, the line is a separate business sitting inside your shop. It has to pay its own way at your shop's own rate per foot, because it is not helping anything else along. That is a clean answer and you should treat it as one.

If most of them put groceries in the basket too, the line is a doorway. Its own earning per foot is beside the point, the way a doormat does not have to earn anything. What you sell on those six feet is a reason to walk in, and the money turns up on the other side of the shop. Do not drop a doorway because of a shelf-foot sum. That is how a shop quietly loses a quarter of its customers and then blames the market.

The two weeks give you a third thing nobody expects: the count. You find out that it is not four households, it is eleven. Or that it is genuinely two.

The honest case for keeping the line

Say the numbers came back poor. There is still a real case for leaving it where it is, and it deserves arguing properly rather than waving away.

The shelf is already paid for. Rent does not go down because you cleared six feet. If nothing better is waiting to go there, dropping the line does not save you the shelf. It gives you an empty corner and Rs 48,000 back once.

The stock is already bought. That Rs 48,000 is spent. Whether it comes back at full rate over seven slow months or at a discount over three fast ones is a real choice, but it is a different choice from whether the line has a future.

A handful of households depend on it. That is worth something in a trade where a customer walks past two other shops out of habit, and habit is the only thing keeping him doing it.

Nothing else wants that corner. Some shelf is awkward: too high, too narrow, in the dark bit behind the door. A line earning Rs 400 a foot there is not a problem. It is a corner doing better than empty.

The supplier terms are real money. If the man who brings your main goods gives you the terms he gives you partly because you also take his stationery, then this was never a stationery decision. Work out what those terms are worth before you touch it. This is one of the places where depending on a single supplier costs you options you did not know you were paying for.

And there is a cost to becoming the shop that stopped keeping things. People remember absences. Two or three lines dropped over a few years and the sentence in the street changes from "he has everything" to "he does not keep much any more". That sentence is very hard to take back.

The honest case for dropping it

Now the other side, argued just as seriously.

The money is the biggest one. Rs 48,000 standing in slow goods is Rs 48,000 not standing in your fast goods, not covering a supplier bill, not available as udhaar, the credit you give, for a customer who buys Rs 8,000 a month from you. Money that turns twice a month earns many times what the same money earns turning twice a year. That is the whole argument, and it is a strong one.

The minimum order is the quiet one. Many slow lines are half-empty permanently, not because you chose it, but because the supplier's smallest order is bigger than you can sell in six months. So you take half of what the shelf needs, the display looks picked over, customers stop trusting the corner, and it sells slower still. A line you cannot stock properly is a line you cannot win with.

Then the risks that ride along with certain goods. Anything with a date on it turns into money in a bin, and a slow corner is exactly where dates go past unnoticed. Anything tied to fashion, colour or a model number becomes unsellable while it is still perfectly good.

And the one people underestimate: attention. A corner you do not sell from is a corner you do not learn from. You stop knowing the rates, which brands moved, what customers ask for. Six months of that and you could not buy for it properly even if you wanted to, so it gets worse for reasons that have nothing to do with the goods.

Put both cases side by side and the shape of the decision is easier to see.

Both cases in one place

Keep the lineDrop the line

What it costs youKeep the lineYour money keeps standing in slow stock, and the shelf stays takenDrop the lineA few weeks of work, some discounting at the end, and an empty corner in between

What it earnsKeep the lineWhatever it earns now, and no more unless you work on itDrop the lineThe stock money comes back once, then the shelf earns at the shop's own rate

What it does for footfallKeep the lineThe households who come only for it keep coming, and buy other things tooDrop the lineYou lose them, unless you keep the fastest items and send people somewhere else

What it risksKeep the lineDates passing, fashion moving, and a corner you slowly stop learning fromDrop the lineBecoming known as the shop that stopped keeping things

Who it suitsKeep the lineA shop whose slip showed real pull, or awkward shelf nothing better wantsDrop the lineA shop short of cash, or one with a better line already waiting for the space

How to drop a line without losing people

Most of the value in this whole decision is not in the deciding. It is in the doing, and this is where shops lose customers they never had to lose.

Start with the mistake that costs the most, because it is the common one. You quietly stop ordering. The rack empties over a few weeks. Then on a Thursday morning Sabir walks in for the same paint brush he has bought from you for eleven years and finds a shelf of biscuits. Nobody told him. He does not think "the corner was not paying its way". He thinks the shop has gone downhill. Then he finds the shop that does keep it, and that shop also sells cooking oil.

The whole method: run it down, tell people while there is still something on the shelf, and know what goes there next.

How to close a line without losing the people who bought it

1. 1Stop reordering. Do not start clearingLet it run down on its own for six to eight weeks. You spend nothing, and you find out what actually moves.
2. 2Tell the regulars while the shelf still has goodsFace to face, in plain words, and name the shop or the market that will have it. Nobody should discover it from an empty rack.
3. 3Keep the two or three items that earn their spaceA line and its three best sellers are not the same decision. One foot near the counter often keeps the whole habit alive.
4. 4Clear the remainder in the right orderReturn what the supplier takes back, sell what still moves at your normal rate, discount only what is left, and take the last of it at whatever you can get.
5. 5Decide what fills the space before it is emptyWrite the replacement down with its buy rate and what you expect it to sell. An empty corner fills itself with cartons and a chair.

One of those steps deserves more. Deciding the replacement before the corner is empty matters far more than it sounds. An empty six feet does not stay empty. It fills with cartons, with a chair, with things that have no home, and six months later you have neither the line nor the earning, and the stock that never sells has simply changed address.

This is also where knowing your buy rates stops being optional. Keep the line's products in one folder with a buy rate on each, the way Wasoolo holds stock, and the corner's money and movement become one number you can look at instead of a feeling you argue about. Working out what the shop actually earns is the same habit applied to everything.

The middle answer that is usually right

Very few lines should be kept whole and very few should be dropped entirely. The answer that fits most shops sits in between, and it is not exciting.

Nearly every line has the same shape. Three or four items are most of its sales. The rest is there because it came in the same order, or because it looked complete on the shelf, or because somebody asked for it once, years ago.

So keep the three. Drop the other thirty.

Pens, registers and glue go out every week and earn their space at your shop's rate. Chart paper, the pencil-box display, the drawing sets and the six colours of file cover do not. Give the three fast ones one foot near the counter, let the other five feet go to something that earns, and you have kept the doorway, kept the households, freed most of the Rs 48,000 and stopped the slow bleed.

The same thinking makes buying in bulk or little and often a per-item question, not a shop-wide one. A line is not one decision. It is thirty decisions made together once and never separated since.

Do that, keep the folder and its buy rates in Wasoolo so you can see what the shrunken corner does over the following months, and you have an answer you can defend to your supplier, to your father and to yourself.

Common questions

How do I measure feet of shelf if my shop is not laid out in neat sections?

Measure the display space the line actually occupies, wherever it sits. Add the hanging rack, the bit on the top shelf, and the boxes under the counter that belong to it. Then round it. The sum does not need to be exact, it needs to be honest, and most shopkeepers are surprised how much a scattered line adds up to.

What if the line earns less per foot but has a much better margin?

Margin on its own decides nothing. A 40% margin on goods that sit for seven months loses to a 12% margin on goods that turn every three weeks, because the second earns its margin many more times over with the same money. Look at earning per foot per month, which already contains both the margin and the speed.

My supplier will be hurt if I stop taking the line. What do I say?

Tell him before you stop, not after, and tell him the truth: the corner is not paying for its space. Ask first whether he can take back what you have or reduce his minimum order, because he often can. Suppliers deal with this constantly, and a shopkeeper who says it face to face keeps the relationship. The one who stops ordering and stops answering the phone does not.

Should I discount everything to clear the line quickly?

No, and this is the most common way to lose money on the way out. Cutting the rate on goods still selling at full rate gives away money you were going to get anyway. Sell the movers normally, and discount only what is still sitting once they are gone. Do it in steps, not one big cut.

What if the line came from my father and I do not want to be the one who ends it?

Then do not end it. Shrink it to the two or three items that carry it, keep them near the counter, and tell your regulars that nothing changes for them. The shop your father built was a shop that made money, and no slow corner is worth carrying at a loss for a decade out of respect.

How long should I wait before judging whether the replacement was better?

Give the new goods three months, because the first six weeks are always slow while customers learn the corner is there. Then run the same sum you ran on the old line: feet, money standing, months of stock held, earning per foot per month. If the replacement is worse, you have learned something real, and you can change it again.