Retailing is a paradise for operations researchers for six reasons:

1. Retailers have clear goals, such as growing sales and gross margin.
2. They have well-defined decisions that directly influence those goals, like what assortment of products to carry, in what quantities, and at what prices.
3. Retailers are collecting consumer transaction data at a prodigious rate. Point of Sale (POS) scanners, customer loyalty cards, website click-through streams, radiofrequency identification (RFID) tags, and smart carts that track a consumer’s path through a grocery store are just a few of the new technologies that enable retailers to capture relevant data for understanding their customers. These data are giving retailers the ability to understand consumers more deeply, through analysis of what they buy, as well as their demographics and even the process by which they decide what to buy, through analysis of click stream or
smart-cart data.
4. Compared with large manufacturing companies I’ve worked with, the pace of implementation of new ideas is much faster in retailing. It is relatively quick to implement on a trial basis a new algorithm for setting prices or inventory levels, and store-SKU POS data will reveal in a few weeks whether the new idea worked.
5. Retailing has always been a favorite context of our field, and many of our classic inventory optimization problems are described through the eyes of a retailer. Let us not forget that the newsvendor is a retailer.
6. Managing inventory is one of the most important things a retailer does, so a key intellectual activity of our
field—inventory optimization—is also of central importance to retail CEOs.

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