The table nobody was wrong about

Week 7

Most expensive mistakes in a shop are somebody's fault. This one is nobody's. Four people each make a defensible decision about the same piece of floor. Every report the business runs afterwards shows the outcome as a success. Money is quietly leaving the till the whole time. The useful question is what kind of report would have caught it.

WR-402 Sorrelby lands at Bexholme in the week beginning 12 April 2027: a printed midi dress, ticket GBP 75.00, cost GBP 27.00, gross margin GBP 48.00 a unit at 64.0%. It is the highest gross margin a unit in the phase, and the only line in the spring campaign. Miriam Vosper has allocated 60 units to Bexholme.

It goes on the front table. Cottrane, which had been on the front table through weeks 5 and 6 selling 85 a week, moves to a four-way freed when the winter knit came off the floor.

Four people agreed, and here is exactly what each of them said.

• Odile Trantham, buyer. It is the statement piece of the season, and the only line customers have seen an image of. If it is not seen, the campaign was money spent on nothing.
• Tamsin Landseer, visual merchandising. The front table is the strongest position in the shop, and the floor guide says hero product goes to the front table.
• Fergus Brightwell, Bexholme. People have been coming in and asking for it by name since the campaign went out.
• Miriam Vosper, merchandiser. GBP 48.00 a unit is the best margin in the phase, and lesson 2's own test puts the front table at 2.19 times the walkway.

Every one of those four statements is true. Three of them are good commercial reasoning. Nobody in this room is careless, nobody is protecting a favourite, and the decision took four minutes.

What the reports said afterwards

Weeks 7 to 12, six trading weeks. Bexholme's counted footfall averaged 4,050 a week against 4,120 in weeks 5 and 6, a difference of 1.7%. That is small enough to leave alone, and it is left alone below.

Sorrelby sold 8 a week on the front table: 48 units in six weeks, four fifths of its Bexholme allocation, at full price, with nothing marked down.

GBP 384.00 a fixture-week beats three of the four carry-in lines at their walkway rates from lesson 1: Yelverdon at GBP 287.10, Melbrake at GBP 248.40, Halbrook at GBP 210.60. On every report Wrayburn ran, the dress was one of the best things in the shop. Nobody went looking for a problem, because on the dress's own line there was not one.

The number nobody had

In week 13, the first week of the next phase, Tamsin cleared the front table for the new season's opening line and moved Sorrelby onto a four-way.

It sold 7.

The dress's position index is 1.14. Not 2.19, the shop average everybody had reasoned from. Not 1.59, which was the lowest index any line in the rotation test returned.

The reason is in the last section of lesson 2, and it is a fact about the fixture rather than about the dress. The Bexholme front table is a folded-stack table. Every reading behind that 2.19 came from a tee, a shirt and a cardigan, folded, on a table. A midi dress folded on a table is a rectangle of print with no shape, no length and no hanger to lift it off. The customer cannot see the garment. Nothing that hangs had ever been measured at P1, and the sentence in the floor guide does not distinguish between a position and a way of showing goods.

Price the swap, both halves

A hero position is never given away. It is exchanged, and the exchange has two sides. Lay the two lines and the two fixtures out together, using only readings that were actually taken at Bexholme.

There are only two ways to put those two lines on those two fixtures.

GBP 462.00 a week, which is 39.0% of what the pair could have earned. Over the six weeks the dress held the table, GBP 2,772 of gross margin at one shop. Bexholme's womenswear gross margin averaged GBP 9,060 a week across the phase, so one pair of fixtures was giving away 5.1% of the department every week.

The same thing in the gain-and-loss form from lesson 2, which is how you would run it before the decision rather than after:

Sorrelby gains by moving in: (8 − 7) × GBP 48.00 = GBP 48.00 a week.

Cottrane loses by moving out: (85 − 34) × GBP 10.00 = GBP 510.00 a week.

Net: minus GBP 462.00 a week.

The dress's gain was real, and it was one tenth of the tee's loss. No report in the business put those two numbers on the same page, because they belonged to two different lines and both lines were healthy.

One more reading, because it is the arithmetic saying the same thing in a different voice. The front table charges 4.00 m² and a four-way charges 2.60 m². Sorrelby on the table earned GBP 96.00 per square metre-week; on the four-way it earned GBP 129.23. The dress was worth more on the smaller fixture.

What Wrayburn refused to do

There is a real argument on the other side, and this course is not going to pretend there is not. The dress on the front table was the campaign made physical: a customer who had seen the image walked in and saw the thing. That is worth something in traffic, in how current the shop looks, and in what she buys next month.

Wrayburn did not put a number on it, and it did not let anybody else put one on it either. One shop and one phase cannot measure it, and a figure invented to close a gap is worse than an open gap, because the next person reads it as a measurement.

What the arithmetic can say is how big that unmeasured benefit would have to be. The shortfall is GBP 462.00 a week, and the dress itself took GBP 384.00 a week off the table. So the campaign effect would have to be worth about 1.2 times everything the dress sold, week after week, for the decision to break even. That is not impossible. It is a large claim, and it now has to be made out loud instead of assumed silently.

Three changes to the floor guide

All three are cheap. None of them needs a system.

1. The sentence gets a number. Hero product goes to the front table becomes: the front table is let at its rent, currently GBP 880 a fixture-week at Bexholme, and a line takes it by beating that. The rent is recomputed from the rotation test each phase.
2. Both halves get priced. No line moves into a hero position until someone has written down what the incumbent loses on the way out. One line of arithmetic, before the decision, not after.
3. An index belongs to a presentation, not to a place. A hanging line has no measured index on a folded table, so it does not get one by inheritance. Until the next rotation test includes a hanging position at the front, anything that hangs goes to the two-arm with a bust form in the first five metres. That is 1.60 m² of charged footprint, and it displaces nothing that was earning GBP 850 a week.

That third change is also the version of week 7 in which nobody had to be wrong. Sorrelby hanging on a form, in the first five metres, seen from the door, and Cottrane still on the table. The dress would have been visible, the campaign would have landed, and the GBP 2,772 would still be in the till. It was never a choice between the dress and the money. It was a folded table nobody had thought to describe as a folded table.

Somebody wants to move a line into a hero position. Before it moves, price both halves of the swap for me.

I will give you three things: the incoming line's rate of sale and gross margin a unit in its current position; the incumbent line's rate of sale and gross margin a unit both in the hero position and in the position it would move to; and any position index I have measured.

Set out the two possible allocations of the two fixtures between the two lines. Total each one per week. Then give me the difference per week, and over the number of weeks the move would last. Show it as gain and loss too: what the incoming line gains by moving in, what the incumbent loses by moving out, and the net.

Two rules. If I have not measured the incoming line in the hero position, do not substitute a shop-average index for it. Tell me the figure is missing, then invert the arithmetic and tell me how many extra units a week the incoming line would have to sell to break even. And if there is a benefit I cannot measure, such as a campaign or how current the shop looks, do not put a number on it. Tell me how large it would have to be for the move to break even, and leave the judgement to me.