Where to start in a giant mess.

I might be out of the retail game but sometimes i can't help but look at things with my retail eyes when i go into shops.

Today it hurt my eyes to walk into a charity store in a nearby town. It was painful to see the state of the shop and that was without causing an accident from the piles of crap left lying around the building.

I have never seen a place as bad as this before in a great location in a busy town. We had stepped inside the door once before to drop of bags but i didn't have time to look around properly. I just saw that it had lots of stock and for me that should be a good thing. I love browsing charity shops for books or random items that you could only find in places like this.

There were two ladies in there who wouldn't know their arse from their elbow when it comes to running a shop. Now i'm sure that they are lovely ladies who volunteer their time to do something good but it just needs to be fixed. It goes against everything that i spend 15 years drilling into staff about merchandising and standards.

It reminded me of those extreme hoarder programs where they have stock piled up to the ceiling in every room and you have to navigate your way around stacks of old clothes and twenty year old papers.

The back half of the store was blocked off to customers to pile up more crap all over the place. You couldn't get at the bookshelves in the front without moving boxes of toys and it was just a nightmare to even walk into.

I have a need to fix it. I might even try. My girlfriend knows the lady in charge and said they would love the help. I was chatting to the lady covering the till when i was trying to maneuver my way into the stock and told her i wanted to turn the place upside down. She said she would be happy to let me at it.

One week to fix fix their store.

All i need is one week. Let me in there every day for that week and reset the whole place. I am 100% sure that i could fix the store layout.

Double their turnover. Create a lot more floorspace. Set up a proper system for new stock and fix the pricing. One week and i could turn around the whole business.

It needs to be brought back to the walls first of all.
Shelf out the walls for all of the book and toys.
Get all of the stock off the ground.
Use the rails to actually sort out the clothes into proper sections.
Take about half the stock off the shop floor altogether.
New stock goes straight into the back and only gets taken out to replace old stock as it gets sold.
Standardized pricing with an easy sticker system.
A section at front of house for flipping quality stock fast.

Quality over quantity.

Merchandising is everything.

A the moment you can't even reach a quarter of the stock sitting in the store so how can you buy it?

Of the stock that you can reach you can only see about half of it. So how can you buy it?

The simple way to empty the store is to start selling it. To do that you need to make people want it. I would have bought 4 or 5 books easily today when i was there. Instead i bought zero as i couldn't get near the book section.

Simple things would easily double their sales and clear out a lot of their existing stock making it even easier to operate going forward.

If i do ever donate my time to fixing it their will be a few more posts with a lot of photos to show how bad this mess really is.