Instill a sales mentality with department staff
If you have enough sales, you will overcome just about every other problem.
That line has been repeated over the years, from many a CEO to many a wise old produce manager, trying to build the "sales mentality" in their employees' heads.
Sales drives the bus. With enough sales history, you can make a valid argument to your store manager when your big idea comes along.
Get the message to clerks
Sales should mean something to your employees too, especially when roughly three-fourths of all produce employees are part-timers and constantly on the lookout for more hours.
Added sales provides the means for justifying more hours.
That's how all retailers operate. With part-timers, a produce manager can increase their hours over, say, a busy weekend or a holiday without having to hire additional help. If employees recognize that extra sales translates into more hours, then they are usually much more willing to get on board when the produce manager is pushing for more sales.
Added sales is in everyone's best interest. It means the work load is spread out to more people. It means the produce inventory turns that much quicker and that there is fresher stock and less to cull. It means more happy customers that, if all goes well, bring their re-generated appetites back to your store for (what else?) more produce, more sales.
Fight for space
One question I pose is this: Are you fighting for extra space to generate more sales?
In the modest chain store near my house, I've noticed that cut watermelon space, for example, is the same sparse, one four-foot shelf allocation - whether it's in August or the middle of winter.
Yikes.
Perhaps the produce manager is locked into a tight merchandising schematic. However, I also can't help but notice that there's a mobile, refrigerated case near the checkstands, and it's always full of the same tired seafood that customers walk past and, from my perspective, simply isn't paying off.
If I were that produce manager I'd be lobbying for that case for (premium-priced/high-gross profit) cut watermelon. I bet the inventory would turn many times during the day, and return to the store a nice chunk of sales for produce and some nice profit margin to the store's bottom line.
A produce manager should be taking advantage of all such nooks and crannies, looking for space to push produce - melons or seasonal fare in the front lobby, foil-wrapped potatoes in the meat department, or a small table of packaged mushrooms in the meat department near the steaks, baskets of lemons and limes in front of the seafood department, bananas near the dairy or cereal aisles.
Basic stuff.
So many possibilities to push for the sales, which helps alleviate at least some of the many other problems.
Armand Lobato works for the Idaho Potato Commission. His 40 years' experience in the produce business span a range of foodservice and retail positions. E-mail armandlobato@comcast.net.
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