Polish Your Merchandising Skills

To get that same incremental contribution of $3,300 from the top-20 item, you’d need a lift of only 155 units, or an increase of 6.2 percent—certainly an easier goal.

The same scenario holds true for your circulation analysis. Trying to get a loser list to work is difficult, if not impossible. However, making your best lists (or even marginal ones) better by a few percentage points is a reasonable challenge and will pay back big profits.