Stock your grocery store with products that will appeal to your target market.
Unless you have the capital and resources to operate a large chain of grocery stores, your success in the grocery business will depend on identifying your target market and tailoring you offerings to accommodate them. There are hundreds of thousands of grocery products, and no grocery business can carry every one of them. Your success will depend on finding a selection that uses yuor available space to your greatest advantage.
Instructions
1. Set up an inventory system for your grocery business. Interview suppliers in your area including full-service distributors as well as independent producers. Choose a line of products well suited to the neighborhood where your store is located and the price range you intend to charge. For example, if you are opening a convenience grocery store on a busy street, you should carry plenty of drinks and snack foods, but if your store is located in an affluent neighborhood you should focus on high-end specialty foods. Set up accounts with your suppliers and develop an inventory system for your store that enables you to rotate stock, monitor sales of particular products and keep track of order dates.
2. Set up a storage area for your grocery store. Keep backstock in a storage room and rotate perishable product regularly. Run a walk-in cooler for backstock of refrigerated product, as well as a walkin freezer if you sell enough frozen food to justify the expense. Find a balance between keeping enough stock on hand to meet current demand and not buying so much inventory that you tie up capital that you might need for other expenses such as payroll.
3. Plan sales and promotions for your grocery store. Use the ends of aisles to stack cases of products you will showcase and also place sale items in prominent places such as near the cash registers. Offer low prices on items that your distributors discount to you, and also plan discounts on products that will draw customers into your store such as baking supplies during holiday seasons. Use these discounted items as the basis of your ad campaigns.
4. Program your point-of-sales systems to process transactions efficiently and provide you with information about sales patterns. Designate cash register keys to correspond with each of your major sales categories, such as dairy, meat and grocery. Track the amount you are spending on each category using information on your purchase receipts, and compare these expenditures with your cash-register data in order to evaluate your margins in each area.
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