Fifty Cases of Skol Special in Stock! The Pub Sold Three a Week.
Fifty cases of Skol Special Strength in stock!
The pub usually sold around three per week.
I found them, or they found me, a week before Christmas, during a stocktake at a wet-led market town pub run by a national operator. The bottle store was jammed. Cases were stacked in nines, and the towers had blocked out the light fitting. The store was dark.
This was the 1990s, over 30 years ago, and it's still etched in my mind.
The lesson hasn't changed: your Christmas order should start with last year's sales report, not a guess.
Related reading: The £1,300 Sitting on Your Shelf · Stock & Ordering Controls
What Was in the Store
A young relief manager had been dropped in at the last minute to cover the site after the previous manager left. With Christmas coming, he placed a couple of sizeable orders. It looked like two wagons had delivered.
Skol Special Strength was the worst of it. The site was selling around three cases a week. He'd ordered fifty.
50 cases ÷ 3 a week = nearly 17 weeks of stock
At today's equivalent of around £30 a case, that's £1,500 sitting in the bottle store
The site was using £90 of it a week
Ordered a week before Christmas, at the normal rate of sale, that one line runs into April.
And that was one product. Löwenbräu Pils and all the usual culprits were stacked alongside it. It wasn't just bottled beers either. Cola, mixers, fruit juices, everything was massively over-stocked. The spirits store and the draught cellar were just as full, it's a wonder the stock wasn't snow-capped given how high it was stacked!
Across the whole site, stockholding had increased eight-fold, from around £5,000 to around £40,000, in 1990s money.
It wasn't one of my usual sites, and I didn't go back for quite a while. I never saw how long it took to clear.
A Busy Period, Not a Three-Month Siege
Lots of venues order for Christmas as if they're about to be involved in a three-month siege. It isn't a siege. It's a busy period.
Then there are the six bottles of Harvey's Bristol Cream purchased to service the sale of three glasses. The same with Warninks Advocaat for Snowballs. You see these gathering dust in many spirit stores, waiting for their turn on Antiques Roadshow.
The relief manager panicked. He ordered off the top of his head. He didn't look at a single sales report, and he didn't make a judgement based on what the site actually sold.
Nothing Stopped the Order
He shouldn't have been able to order that much. And he shouldn't have been put in that position.
But this was the 1990s. Ordering was mostly manual, and the controls that would have caught an order like that weren't in place. So two things went wrong. The order wasn't based on data. And nothing stood between the order and the delivery.
Who checks your Christmas order before it goes in?
Order From Last Year's Sales, Not The Back of a Napkin
It's absolutely essential to look at your sales reports from last Christmas and plan your ordering around that data.
Pull last Christmas's sales, line by line.
Plan the order around what you actually sold.
Take account of any large parties or events already booked.
Not on the back of a napkin.
Get it wrong, and your cash profit from Christmas ends up paying the invoice for overstock that sits on your shelves for months. You might as well have pinned a load of £50 notes to the cellar wall and saved the energy of putting the delivery away.
Fifty cases of Skol. Three a week. Nearly 17 weeks of cash on one line.
Before the Wagons Turn Up
I'm David Holden. I've spent 40 years in the hospitality industry, over 30 of them working across hospitality audit and operations, helping hotels, pubs, restaurants and bars identify where profit is being lost and put practical controls in place to stop it.
Fifty cases of one beer, at a pub that sold three a week. If your Christmas order is being put together from a guess-timate rather than last year's sales, get in touch before it goes in.
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