Retail Optimization

A store manager does not usually make assortment and pricing decisions inside a clean optimization textbook. More often, the decision lives in a less glamorous place: a sales spreadsheet, a distributor agreement, an approval memo, last month’s exception report, a half-remembered rule about which customer can handle which category, and one person in the room saying, “This SKU always works in that region.” Retail intelligence, in other words, often begins as a pile of semi-structured clues wearing a business-casual disguise. ...