Sleeves and trucking inventory

A preview from the upcoming book Call of the Mall, Simon & Schuster, January 2004.



Okay, so now we're in a fancy department store, in fact, the fanciest department store in this particular mall. Yes, we're standing in ladies' clothing, so to speak. And when we look from here on the outskirts (no pun intended) into the department proper, we see—Sleeves.

Not disembodied sleeves, of course—but the view from this particular spot is of women's suit jackets hanging on racks, and the racks are positioned in a way that saves space, a result of which is that the sides of the jackets—meaning the sleeves—are what face the oncoming shopper. You can tell quite a bit about a jacket by looking at the sleeve, it's true—the color and fabric at the very least—but a jacket must be seen from the front to experience it. This should come as no surprise to the executives of this famous department store chain, and yet somehow, standing here, what we see are sleeves.

Ask the retail executives, "What can be done?"

"Well, there's actually a very simple solution. You could turn the racks on an angle or chevron the racks, so instead of the shopper looking head-on into the sleeve, they'd see a three-quarter view of the front of the first jacket in each rack."

A flaw in modern store design is that we plan layouts as if they were static pieces of architecture. A real store is about people moving and looking. We walk facing forward. In order to look directly at a box of cereal or a bottle of shampoo on a supermarket shelf, we'd have to turn and face squarely sideways. But of course it's impossible (or at least dangerous) to walk facing sideways. And so we tend to examine shelves and racks and so on from an angle.

In every store there is also a dominate flow or direction to customer movement. If the merchandise was angled to face us, we'd see it head-on as we walk. I call it "chevroning". It works in many store situations impacting sales and reducing customer frustration. There's another advantage too. When you angle the racks, you actually eat up more floor space than when the layout is squared up. So you have room for fewer goods on display. And shoppers think it looks like there's more merchandise on the floor, not less. You can fill up the selling floor using fewer goods, which can translate into lower inventory costs.

Managing the amount of merchandise on the floor is a 21st century issue. Stores are increasingly becoming like homes without closets. However well designed and intentioned, the store floor reflects the state of inventory. Once upon a time, department stores had vast warrens of stock rooms and storage areas. Today the pressure is on to make every square foot count. Everything goes straight to the selling floor.

One of the most abused measures in modern retailing is sales per square foot. The pressure to use every precious piece of the floor to display product in many cases is counter productive. For discount retailers such as Aldi and Dollar General, physical crowding is the part of the excitement of looking for bargains. It can work for very specific and defined sales at department stores. The rest of the time we need balance and room to showcase the quality of the goods the retailer is selling. How can we measure the value of a good designer or visual merchandiser, if most of the year its really trucking inventory that controls the store floor?