Retail supply chain - statistics & facts
The retail supply chain defines all the logistics operations put in place by retailers to deliver products to end consumers. Before the actual sale of products, retailers run regular inventories, assessing the value of merchandise available in stores over a given period. In this process, the inventory-to-sales ratio well describes the relationship between the amount of available inventory and monthly sales performed by retailers.
The measures imposed during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic affected the retail supply, leading to higher rates of out-of-stock and overstock of consumer goods. The global inventory distortion related to out-of-stock grocery products was valued at over five hundred billion U.S. dollars in 2020. While retailers might have struggled with inventory distortion costs at store level, manufacturers carried even higher costs for disrupted demand.
