Eli5 How do grocery stores around the world afford to be fully/half stocked in a product 24/7 simultaneously even in small towns where not everything’s bought?

Question

Eli5 How do grocery stores around the world afford to be fully/half stocked in a product 24/7 simultaneously even in small towns where not everything’s bought?

In: 47

Answer 1

this is b/c of all the attention to Inventory management and supply chain organization. People get university degrees in that.

common approach that the store is visited by a supplier truck daily. The truck carries many different products in it, and truck driver (or a dedicated merchandiser) re-fills the shelves with whichever products are running low. The science is used to compute how many units of product is “running low”, and how many to put on the shelf when restocking.

Despite this, stores do run out of things. They try to hide it by rearranging remaining products so you cannot see any “empty shelves”.