2017Issue5_Alabama_v6

The Smart Store Manager’s Role

When walking the store, a manager should generally consider these priorities: • The Morning Store Walk: Ensure detailed rotation for freshness, items on hand and stock readiness, advertised item availability to meet the day’s anticipated sales, backroom and coolers organization and cleanliness, proper signage per company plan, store floor safety check, and proper execution of prior evening close-down, clean-up, and next-day prep. • The Mid-Day Store Walk: Coolers clean and organized, code dated for quality and freshness optimization and FIFO rotation. • The Mid-Day Walk is also the time Manager’s should recognize over-stock conditions and make determinations inventory rotation, backdoor security checks, all racks level and properly merchandised, dumpster check for excess loss, known loss recordkeeping, specific awareness of department sanitation best practices, and store floor safety check.

• The Afternoon Store Walk: Advertised item availability to meet the day’s anticipated sales, department manager plan for evening coverage, product presentation is neat and ready to meet anticipated sales, and store floor safety check. The Sanitation of Making Profit with Perishables No study or discussion of perishable department shrink control would be complete without a review of necessary sanitation practices. Remember that, unlike groceries or frozen foods, perishables are living (hence dying) materials, which means that germs and bacteria can easily grow there. Unclean or poorly refrigerated conditions accelerate the cellular breakdown of perishable products. Proper refrigeration, sanitation, and handling slows this deterioration process and reduces your perishable shrink. Review the chart to the right for proper refrigeration temperatures.

In all of perishables management and profit optimization, the most important initiative is teaching store managers to understand and supervise their perishable departments for optimal profit and customer satisfaction. This training precedes all reports and graphs and charts and technology. Store teams need to see and feel profitable operations and then be additionally enabled by smart technology. A well-trained store manager is your linchpin to delivering a clean, fresh, well stocked, and customer- service ready profitable selling condition. Perishables have the power to give your store a distinguishable personality and will touch the customer’s senses in a way that dry groceries can’t. Start every day with a “purposeful” store walk. Store managers should walk their stores frequently and inspect perishable conditions and readiness every two to three hours.

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