Chapter 23
Coats sold nothing in July. Should I dump them?
Almost certainly not — but the report cannot tell you that, and it is important to know why it cannot rather than to distrust it.
A report about slow stock does not know about seasons. A winter coat with no summer sales is out of season, not dead — so read the ranking as a list of questions to ask, never as a list of things to clear out.
What the report actually measures
The slow-stock report ranks by COVER: how many days of stock you are holding, given how fast the item has been selling. Twenty coats selling one a week is twenty weeks of cover. Nothing selling at all has no cover at all, which is why those items come first and why the page says "never sold" rather than leaving the cell empty.
It ranks by cover and not by silence on purpose. "Nothing sold for sixty days" sounds like the right question and is not: it would put a cheap item that has not moved above an expensive one that barely moves, and the question you are really asking is which MONEY is stuck.
Why it cannot see the season, and why we say so instead of guessing
Telling a winter coat in July apart from a genuinely dead line needs a comparison with the same weeks LAST year. Everything in this system is confined to the year you are signed in to, deliberately, so that comparison is not one it will make — and a guess dressed up as an answer would be worse than none.
So the limitation is printed on the page itself, every time, rather than buried in a manual. The report is honest about being blind to seasons, and the reader supplies the season.
The question to ask instead
For every line near the top, ask one thing: did this sell last year, at the time of year when it should? If it did, it is stock waiting for its season, and the only real decision is whether you have too much of it waiting. If it did not — and it has now had its season — that is dead stock, and it is the money the report exists to find.
The second question is smaller and worth asking anyway: is this the only size left? A rail of coats in one size is not slow stock, it is a broken range, and clearing it is right for a reason that has nothing to do with the season.
What to do with the genuinely dead
Sell it. A discount that hurts is cheaper than the shelf, and the money is only worth something once it is money again. The figure the report shows beside each line is what is asleep there — treat it as the size of the prize rather than the size of the loss.
And look at the list once a month, not once a year. A line caught after one season is a markdown; the same line caught after three is a skip.