Every time I hear about retailer resets, I'm utterly amazed at how this seemingly archaic system has lasted for so long.
For context: your average grocery store does not change the products it offers on its shelves very often. This normally only takes place twice a year during that retailer's "reset window," where some new products are added to the shelves and some lesser performing products are removed. Usually a retailer will have one reset in the spring and one reset in the fall, and those are often a food company's only two chances per year at getting a product into distribution at that retailer.
But I just cannot believe that in a world where companies like Amazon have used customer data to completely reverse engineer the shopper psyche and generate up to 35% of their sales using their proprietary product recommendation algorithms, grocers are still insisting they will only revisit their product offerings on the same cadence as their CEO's semiannual dental check-ups. There doesn't seem to be any good reason grocers cannot use data in a similar way to optimize what products they are offering at what times of year and on what specific launch schedule to better serve their customers.
I know there is plenty of operational complexity that comes with changing product offerings this frequently, and I do truly believe that shoppers like experiencing consistency at the grocery store, so constantly adding or removing products from shelves could be poorly received. But it's not like this is a new idea: Costco uses a reset-less model, swapping products in and out depending on how well they believe the product will resonate with consumers during that time of year, and it seems to work quite well for them. I by no means have the retail knowledge necessary to take a stance on this too firmly, but I've written before about how little innovation there is in the food and beverage industry, and this practice of retailer resets just seems like another area totally ripe for disruption.
Your move, Safeway.
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