Managing Retail Displays this Black Friday

Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days of the year.  This is an exciting and sometimes stressful time for retail store owners and managers.  You need to be prepared for long hours, a lot of traffic, constant restocking, and you still can’t let customer service and your image slide into second place.  You and your employees need to be ready to handle anything.  Use these tips to keep your sanity and bring your profits into the black this Black Friday.

1)  One problem on Black Friday is employees.  Most stores open really early to get shoppers early on in their spending spree.  Employees that are used to coming into work around nine or ten AM are not usually keen on being there at four o’clock in the morning.  Plus, taking care of an endless sea of customers is really hard work, dreaded by most retail employees.  You need to offer a reward incentive to ensure that employees will actually show up.  You may also offer alternating hours off during the day so that your employees can also get some of their Black Friday shopping done.

2)  The second problem retailers run into is keeping enough inventory on hand.  Hopefully you have a past year’s data to indicate how much inventory you will need to get through this day.  Try not to be afraid of ordering too much.  Even if you can’t move it all on Black Friday, you still have a few weeks to sell it.

3)  Keeping your displays fully stocked is an important part of making sales.  Make sure that your employees are constantly stocking and straightening your showcases, shelves, and garment racks.  When an item is running low, people sometimes assume that you are not restocking it for some reason.  Studies show that people buy more when there is more on display.  Plus you want them to know that you have all sizes available.  If a stack is low, they might bypass it thinking that you probably don’t have the size that they need, or that it’s already picked over.

4)  There’s a trick to camouflaging areas that are running low on merchandise that you can use to keep your store looking stocked.  If you have slatwall or gridwall, you are in luck.  You can easily combine similar items when they run low and then rearrange hanging bars and shelves to keep the wall looking full.  For example, if you had forty shirts hanging on one bar and you’re down to fifteen, then the rack will look really empty.  With slatwall or a grid wall, you can simply switch out the hanging bar that holds forty to the one that holds twenty.  Suddenly your display looks full again.