Some of the UK's largest grocers, including a few with some of the most interesting booze aisles around, are running range reviews this year which means that there’ll be fewer SKUs on shelf. I understand the commercial logic. Space is expensive, rates and staffing costs keep rising and a tighter range is easier to manage and easier to justify to a board. We have been here before too. A similar retrenchment happened two or three years ago, and within a couple of years those same retailers quietly rebuilt the ranges they had cut because a shelf that only stocks the five best known names stops being interesting to anyone who already knows what they want.
For an independent retailer, that gap is not just background noise. It is a genuine opportunity, provided you know how to use it.
When a major multiple trims its range, it does not remove brands people never wanted. It removes the ones that did not clear the bar on rate of sale or margin per linear foot, which is a different thing entirely from removing brands nobody liked. Those displaced products still have a customer looking for them. I’d watch what disappears from the supermarket shelf near you and treat it as a shortlist of what to bring in, not a signal to avoid it.
Signpost the gap clearly
Stocking the right bottle only works if the customer knows to look for it. A simple shelf card or a word from staff explaining that something is no longer available at the supermarket down the road turns a routine purchase into a reason to come back. You don’t need to name a retailer directly to make the point land, you just need the customer to leave knowing you carry something they cannot get elsewhere nearby.
A national range review is unfortunately, at its core, a decision made by algorithms. It is driven by numbers on a screen and none of that is wrong on its own terms, but it is a very different discipline from actually knowing your customer and being able to make a confident recommendation across the counter. That is precisely what an independent retailer can do and a head office review cannot. A member of staff who can say why a bottle is worth trying is offering something no spreadsheet will ever replicate and it is the single biggest advantage independents hold right now.
What this means for your store
Independent retailers are not competing with the big chains on scale, and they never will; but scale is not what is being cut right now. Judgement is. Watch what the multiples drop, stock the strongest of it, tell your customers plainly why it is there and back it with a genuine recommendation at the till. In my view that’s exactly the ground independents should be occupying while the supermarkets work out what they have given away.
Nick Gillett Photo: Handout