Merchandising: Juggling Stats?

Minix’s metric is expressed as sales/square inches/circulation x 1,000. “I multiply by 1,000 because it’s usually quite a small number.”

Dividing by circ takes out variances in circ from effort to effort and let’s you monitor the item’s performance over time. “I would then sort all items by this result and draw a line at the one that represented the assortment given the percentage of new items I wanted in the next effort,” Minix says. “Everything below the line had to have another reason to stay in the next effort (high units, high margin, etc.). This is great for the starting point of determining what should go forward and what should be dropped.”