My local grocery store switched to JIT stocking of shelves: they’re now perennially out of 1 in 10 basics, and I just shop online. Amazon Fresh can routinely be out of things too, but at least they don’t waste my time doing it.
The only value in a grocery store was that it was a warehouse of food stocks that smoothed out the irregularities suppliers face. If I have to deal with supplier problems because they JIT stock, I may as well just get deliveries directly from suppliers.
You can’t “JIT” when your entire value is supply smoothing, because you’re increasing the failure modes of your core business for tangential benefits.
People keep showing me math that says it works, and places keep trying it, but I’ve yet to see it do anything but significantly damage their core business for questionable benefit.
I can't seem to find a reference, but I remember hearing years ago someone trying to adopt Japanese convenience store stock strategy. Apparently, the small stores have a good relationship with their peers and exchange goods as needed. The distributed nature compensates for deep stock.
Similarly, when I worked for Pizza Hut years ago about once a month we'd run low or out of something and would phone up 1 or 2 nearby stores and send a driver out to make the swap.
While we’re calling out good examples, Toyota’s whole Kanban system is the root of most JIT manufacturing or business, as a formalized method. Toyota was very successful with it.
I didn’t mean to imply it couldn’t be done, but rather three points:
- It’s very challenging to get right, requires a lot of buy in and restructuring, and takes time to transition to.
- It’s an extremely risky thing to do if, unlike Toyota, your value proposition isn’t manufacturing, but instead smoothing the supply between a manufacturer and a customer.
- Most people implementing JIT have a poor model of the variances, and undervalue disruptions (in terms of harm to customers, lost goodwill, etc — the intangibles).
Taken together, I think it’s extremely challenging to do JIT for grocery stores, and they’re basically building a black swan nest, no matter how careful.
Spoilage in exchange for consistency is what I pay them for: removing that risks removing the value they deliver me.
The only value in a grocery store was that it was a warehouse of food stocks that smoothed out the irregularities suppliers face. If I have to deal with supplier problems because they JIT stock, I may as well just get deliveries directly from suppliers.
You can’t “JIT” when your entire value is supply smoothing, because you’re increasing the failure modes of your core business for tangential benefits.
People keep showing me math that says it works, and places keep trying it, but I’ve yet to see it do anything but significantly damage their core business for questionable benefit.