Layered Retail Merchandizing: Strategies to Capture All Customer Behaviors

Layered Retail Merchandizing

Strategies to Capture All Customer Behaviors

Herb Sorensen, PhD

Very few supermarket retailers are aware that half of all shopping trips result in the purchase of five or fewer items. (These numbers come from actual transaction logs from every continent except Africa and Antarctica.)

A thousand items contribute half the dollar sales. (The same phenomenon holds for other classes of trade.) As noted here, those few items generating the lion’s share of sales are referred to as “the big head,” while those thousands of other items—and they do generate significant sales—are referred to as “the long tail.”

Also, three basic segments (types of customers) exhibit fairly distinctive shopping behaviors, as follows:

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