The Order You Place By Habit
The weekly order is last week's order with a couple of adjustments, and last week's was the one before that. Where the habit came from, what it is costing, and the twenty minutes that fixes it.
The order goes in on the same day, for roughly the same things, in roughly the same quantities.
Nobody decided those quantities. They are inherited from a version of the venue that may not exist any more.
Where the numbers came from
An opening estimate. Made before anyone knew what would sell, and never revisited.
A busy period that ended. Quantities set during a peak and left there.
A supplier's minimum. ⚠️ Frequently the real determinant — the case size, not the demand.
One memorable shortage. You ran out once, three years ago, and the order has been higher ever since.
What the habit costs
Money in stock that is not moving. Cash sitting on a shelf, and in a small operation that is cash you needed.
Waste on the perishable lines. Bought weekly, used at a lower rate, discarded quietly.
Space. ⚠️ Which is scarce and never costed — over-ordering one line pushes out somewhere to put another.
And the shortages continue anyway. ⚠️ The revealing part. Habitual ordering over-supplies some lines and under-supplies others simultaneously, because it is not tracking either.
The twenty minutes
Once, then quarterly.
Take one month of sales by item. Not impressions.
Compare against one month of orders. ⚠️ The gaps will be obvious and some will be surprising — lines ordered at twice the rate they sell, and lines that run out weekly.
Adjust the top ten lines only. They are most of the money. The long tail can wait.
Then look again next quarter, because demand moves and this is exactly how the habit formed the first time.
What to look at beyond quantity
Order frequency. ⚠️ Ordering less, more often, reduces both waste and stock-outs — where the supplier allows it, this is frequently the single largest improvement available.
Case sizes. If the case is bigger than a fortnight of demand, ask. Suppliers split cases more often than people assume, and almost nobody asks.
Who places it. ⚠️ If one person orders by memory, the memory is the system — and it leaves when they do.
Standing orders. Anything arriving automatically deserves annual review; these drift furthest because nobody re-places them.
The seasonal correction
⚠️ The habit is worst at the turns of the season. Quantities set in summer, running into a quieter autumn, or the reverse.
Two corrections a year, on dates in the diary, catch most of it.
The order is a decision that stopped being one
Set once by whoever was doing it then, for the trade they had then
Repeated since with a small nudge after anything went badly wrong
⚠️ Every quantity in the standing order is an answer to a question nobody has re-asked, and the trade it was answering has moved.
The direction the nudges go
Ran out once the number goes up, permanently
Threw some away nothing happens, because nobody sees it
⇒ ⚠️ Corrections are asymmetric. Running out is visible and embarrassing; waste is invisible and quiet — so the numbers only ever drift upward.
What the habit actually costs
Cash sitting in the store room money you have already spent
The space it occupies and the older stock behind it
Waste the part you can see
The shortage because the wrong things were ordered
⚠️ The fourth is the expensive one and it looks like the opposite problem, so it gets answered by ordering more of everything.
Twenty minutes, once
What ran out last month and on which nights
What is still there from before which lines never move
What changed in the trade a new drink, a lost regular, a different crowd
⚠️ Do this against one month, not a year. A year averages away the thing you are trying to see.
Do it before you talk to the supplier
⇒ ⚠️ Walking in with three numbers changes the conversation entirely. Without them you get the standard order again, because that is what you asked for last time.
Beyond quantity
Frequency smaller and more often costs more per unit and less in total
Timing an order landing Thursday is a different order from Tuesday
Substitutes what you will accept when the first choice is unavailable
⚠️ The third one is never agreed in advance, so it gets decided by whoever answers the phone on a busy afternoon.
The seasonal correction nobody makes
Ordered flat all year short in the busy months, wasteful in the quiet ones
Adjusted twice a year most of the gap disappears
⚠️ Twice is enough. Monthly adjustment is more work than it returns, and no adjustment at all is the most expensive option of the three.
Put the review on a date
⇒ ⚠️ A standing order with no review date is permanent by default. Two dates in the year, written down, is the entire mechanism.
Three to hold
Waste by item, monthly. ⚠️ Concentrated in a few lines, and those are the ones to adjust.
Stock-outs by item. The other half. A venue with both is not ordering too much or too little — it is ordering by habit.
Value of stock held against a week of sales. The number that shows how much cash is on the shelves, and most operators have never calculated it.
Where the record has to sit
Comparing what sold against what was ordered needs both, itemised, over the same month. If orders live with the supplier and sales are a daily total, the comparison cannot be made and the order stays as it was.
tasteck keeps orders itemised against the takings they produced, so what actually sold can be set beside what was bought.
Nobody is ordering carelessly. They are ordering exactly what was ordered last week, which is the most reasonable thing to do when nobody has ever produced the comparison.
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