Stocking Plan for a Small General Store

A stocking plan is three decisions in order: how many SKUs the floor can hold, how the list splits between shelf-stable and perishable, and how stock rotates once it arrives.

Start with the floor. A sales area of 150-400 square metres supports roughly 1,500-4,000 SKUs; fixing that ceiling before talking to suppliers prevents the classic opening mistake of ordering to the catalogue.

Split the list by risk. Shelf-stable lines — canned staples at 2-5 years, white rice at 2 years or more, sealed flour at 6-8 months — tolerate forecasting errors, while chilled lines such as milk at 10-21 days sealed punish them. The first order should lean shelf-stable until four to six weeks of sales data exist.

Plan the shelves before the stock arrives. The prime selling band is 120-160 cm from the floor and belongs to fast, high-margin lines; anything over 10 kg goes below 60 cm for lifting safety.

Rotation is where the plan succeeds or fails. Gross margins in small food retail run about 20-35% across staple categories, so a single expired case can cancel the profit on the cases around it.

The department list this plan fills in is on What a General Store Sells (/what-a-general-store-sells); the cabinet settings it assumes are on the temperatures page (/store-temperatures-and-shelf-life).

• Date-mark every case on the delivery day it arrives
• Load new stock behind old stock, never in front
• Pull short-dated items to the front of the shelf at each tidy
• Count chilled lines weekly; count canned and dry lines monthly
• Cut any SKU that has not moved within its first shelf-life window

Further reading

• What a General Store Sells
• Store Temperatures and Shelf Life