Dead stock is money you already spent, sitting on a shelf. Most owners know they have some. Very few have the free day it takes to find all of it, so it sits for months.
Reggie, the AI store manager from Idle Work, does that check for you every morning. It reads your register, finds every item that has not sold inside your cutoff, adds up what is sitting on the shelf, and drafts a markdown that stays above the price floor you set. You say yes or no. Nothing changes on the register until you say OK.
What it looks like in your morning brief
Every morning Reggie goes through yesterday by the numbers and sends you a few plain sentences over the chat apps you already use. Here is the dead stock line from a sample store we made up to show it:
"Dead stock: 41 items have not sold in 60 days. Want me to draft a markdown that stays above your floor?"
The owner answers "Yes, draft the markdown." Reggie comes back with a draft of 41 items, none under the floor, and waits. Those numbers belong to the sample store. Your cutoff and your floor are your own.
From the same brief you also get:
- How long each item has sat, so the oldest stock gets the deepest attention first.
- The money tied up in it, so you work the list from the most stock on hand down.
- A sale plan built from what is not moving, with a flyer drafted when you say yes.
- Prices under your floor, including every cost increase you never passed on, which is often why an item looks dead when it is really mispriced.
Why dead stock costs more every month you wait
Leaving it in place is not free. Four costs keep growing:
- Shelf space. Every foot holding stock that does not sell is a foot not holding stock that does.
- Money on the shelf. You paid for every unit. That money is working at zero while the reorder you need waits next to it.
- Markdown depth. A light markdown in month two often moves an item. The same item in month eight can need a deep cut, and some of it still will not sell.
- Spoilage and wear. Food expires on the shelf. Hardware gets dented, faded and shopworn, which pushes the markdown deeper again.
Stock does not go from fine to dead overnight. It slides from selling to slow to stuck while you are busy running the store. A check that runs every morning catches it on the way down, when a small markdown still works.
You stay in charge of every price
Reggie works in four levels, and it starts by watching:
- Watch. It reads the register, the books and the bank and tells you what it sees. It changes nothing.
- Suggest. It tells you what it would do and why, with the numbers, and leaves the call to you.
- Act with your OK. It gets the markdown ready and waits for your yes.
- Act within your limits. Inside limits you set, it gets on with the job and tells you what it did.
You raise each level yourself, one at a time. Reggie can never raise its own, and price changes on the register always need your OK at every level. It connects to the register you already run with one small program on each register that only reads. It never rings a sale, voids, refunds or opens the drawer.
If you want to do it by hand first
It is worth doing once so you know what the numbers feel like:
- Export unit sales by item for the last 60 to 90 days from your register.
- Pick a cutoff, such as nothing sold in 60 days, tighter for anything that expires.
- Sort every item into moving, slow and dead. The dead pile is your list.
- Add what you paid for the units on hand and work the list from the most stock down.
- Check price and placement before you cut. A hidden or mispriced item can read as dead.
- Choose a treatment per item: markdown, feature it in a sale, return it to the vendor or bundle it.
A careful pass over every item takes most of a day, and it is out of date a week later. That is the real reason it rarely gets done, and the reason to hand it to something that does it every morning.
Put the shelf back to work
Clearing dead stock does more than empty a shelf. The space goes to items that sell, and the buying budget goes after products with a real sales history. The same store simply works harder.
Book an assessment and we look at your register with you, or read more about Reggie.