Unused Point-of-Sale: Where Does the Money Go?

Ask anyone who's run a retail campaign what happened to the last batch of displays and you'll usually get a bit of a pause. Some of them went up, a few are still sitting in a backroom somewhere, one or two came back damaged, and honestly nobody's completely sure about the rest.

The research on this is more blunt than you'd expect, because study after study puts it somewhere between 40 and 60% of point-of-sale material that never actually makes it onto the shop floor. It all gets designed and approved and printed and freighted, and then it just sits in a stockroom until a clean-out comes along and sends it to landfill. You paid for every bit of it, and most of it never got the chance to sell a single thing, which is the part that stings once you see it written down.

So we built a calculator, because averages from someone else's business are easy to shrug off but your own numbers aren't. There are four sliders: how many displays you produce in a year, what they cost you all-in, how many you honestly reckon actually get installed, and roughly what they weigh. From that it gives you back two figures, the annual spend that never earned its keep, and the tonnage that's heading to landfill with your logo on it.

Run your numbers

There are a couple of things people tend to notice when they try it. The first is that even if you're optimistic and set the miss rate down at 20%, the figure is still bigger than most budgets have a line for. The second is that the waste almost never turns out to be a printing problem, because the printer did their job and the freight company did theirs, and the real issue is that nobody actually owned whether the display went up or not. That's where the money leaks, in the gaps between everyone who touched it.

The good news is that if your print costs are higher than you'd like, that's fixable. Sometimes it's as simple as splitting one run across stores so each gets what it needs. One of the ways we add value is by working out your total volume for the year and running a single, longer print run. Longer runs bring the unit cost down, so you often save more over the year than you would printing smaller batches as needed.

Walgreens did exactly that with one of their fixtures and cut the cardboard production by two-thirds, which reportedly kept around 197 tonnes of material out of the waste stream in a single year. And sometimes the fix is honestly just having one partner who's responsible for the whole chain, so those gaps between vendors close up on their own.

So run your numbers, email the result to yourself so it's there in front of you for the next budget conversation, and that really is all it does, we're not going to chase you afterwards. But if you'd like a second pair of eyes on where your gap actually is, reply to that email or give us a call on +64 9 636 7517, because it's the problem we work on all day.

And it's worth remembering that a display which never goes up isn't just wasted money, it's a brand moment that never got the chance to happen.