Behind the scenes of any retail store for decades has been cluttered with excess inventory, seasons’ worth of displays that are no longer current, holiday decorations from past years, and stacks of old cardboard boxes and filing.
Sometimes, filing papers for years after the fact. Many retailers have just come to accept that the backroom is a part of their business that they have to deal with.
Switching to custom boxes that ship and store flat is one simple way retailers can cut down the backroom clutter that eats into usable floor space. But the math of retailing physical space has changed drastically over the last few years. With the cost of commercial real estate skyrocketing and a push to create an experiential retail environment, every square foot of retail space has to pull its weight.
So, storing filing, compliance documents, and old archives in a backroom of a retail store is no longer just an organizational issue; it is an issue that costs a retailer money, as every square foot that is not pulling its weight is taking away from the space’s profit.
But the math has changed! With the cost of commercial real estate shooting up (often doubling over the last few years) and everyone scrambling to create an “experience” retail space, every square foot of retail space must now generate as much, or more, revenue than it did in the past.
Storing a bunch of old files, piles of compliance documents, and a stock of historical and redundant documents in the back room of a retail store is an expensive and unproductive overhead.
It is a cost that is eating into the store’s revenue margins.
The Evolution of the Retail Floor
Now compare this to the backroom of a typical store.
Spaces are closed off, dusty, contain outdated archives, and in some cases, old, broken fixtures.
They don’t contribute to the brand image and take away from potential sales.
To create a better retail experience, you must optimize every square foot to drive maximum revenue.
This means taking a long, hard look at your backroom to identify ways to increase efficiency and remove any unnecessary items that take up valuable space.
Lost space hurts.
Clutter on the sales floor can have customers looking frazzled, while clutter in the back room takes a huge toll on employees and store productivity.
By removing administrative detritus from your store, you free up space to create more showroom and allow your customers the room to browse without feeling jammed.
Every merchant needs to optimize every square foot of space to get the maximum return on their expensive store space.
Dead space equals dead revenue.
However, in today’s Retail Environment, to make money, every square foot needs to be optimized to generate as much revenue as possible.
So, looking at the backroom and determining how to store everything there in the most effective manner to optimize as much space as possible in the front of the store is imperative.
We may be viewing the backroom in a way that doesn’t give it the respect it deserves, helping the retailer optimize as much space as possible and maximize revenue in today’s competitive environment.
The Administrative Burden
All retailers in physical commerce generate a huge amount of paperwork, including receipts, supplier invoices, audit paperwork, personnel records, etc.
A lot of this is required by law to be stored for many years, so it cannot simply be thrown away.
Those left to handle paper management can find themselves spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with paperwork, forms, etc.
Most retailers will have employees who could be better utilized in areas of the business, such as training other employees, dealing with customer service issues on the sales floor, or addressing concerns from management.
Paper management issues can and do hinder a retailer’s ability to service its customers properly and keep employees from being more productive in other retail functions.
Mislabeling of boxes, deterioration of important papers due to moisture, and breaches of sensitive information are just a few of the reasons why retailers find themselves transferring archival-type functions to an off-site storage provider.
A simple loss of an important compliance audit document, before the actual audit occurs, will keep any retailer up at night.
The use of 24/7 online retrieval systems eliminates these problems and allows retailers to sleep better at night.
Beyond simple space constraints, storing documents in off-site self-storage facilities for a retail establishment creates a host of issues, including: being a significant waste of an employee’s time to retrieve a single document; being extremely cost-prohibitive; and exposing the retail establishment to liability.
The smartest thing a retailer can do with documents is to use a document storage and management facility specializing in this area, such as Corodata record storage.
They can clear out the back room of the establishment and store all critical documents securely, manage them, and make them easily accessible as needed for audits and compliance reviews.
By having a business’s documents stored off-site by a professional document storage company, such as Corodata record storage, a merchant can clear out all backroom space and have their vital documents stored, managed, and secured in a single location.
That stored information can then be retrieved in a matter of hours whenever a merchant needs to refer to a document for compliance, tax, or legal reasons.
All of this can be done by leaving the store’s daily operations to its staff and having the document storage company handle the storage, organization, and retrieval of all the store’s documents.
So, why keep struggling to build a makeshift archive in a space meant for commerce? It comes down to breaking old habits.
Reclaiming the Workspace for the Team
Beyond the opportunity to sell more products by reclaiming space for high-margin items, the biggest impact of clearing the clutter in your store’s backroom is on store morale and the efficiency of its operations.
The backroom of the store is the behind-the-scenes area where employees perform the functions necessary to operate the store. In effect, the backroom of the store is the “workplace” of your employees.
The energy in the backroom of the store will mirror that on the sales floor.
Think of the fulfillment of orders. Are your employees able to retrieve merchandise promptly? If the backroom of your store is cluttered with old files, paper, etc., it’s going to make your employees’ day more difficult. It creates a messy environment.
A disorganized backroom causes stress for employees and reduces productivity.
Removing the archives from the backroom and keeping the area organized can have many positive effects for a store.
For one, it can make the process of receiving and stocking shipments of new merchandise much more efficient.
This, in turn, can help get the best, highest-margin products on the floor more quickly and also help keep customers waiting for items the store has in stock to a minimum.
A clean backroom sends a clear signal.
This will make your team members very happy and, most importantly, make them feel that their workspace is as important as the rest of the store.
Making the Shift
Changing from hoarding documents in the back of your store to keeping them off-site for optimal use by your company, with retrieval as needed, requires a change in how your store is operated.
This can start with an audit of what documents are being stored in the back of your store, and then go on to establishing the length of time that certain types of documents will be kept, and then establishing protocols for storing and retrieving such documents once they are deemed to be no longer needed in the back of your store.
Audit Your Current Assets: The first step to changing how you store administrative documents is to identify what you currently have and categorize them as either needed for daily operations or purely historical or archival.
Set up Procedures: Review the documents you currently keep, and establish procedures for what you will keep on-site and what will go to off-site storage as soon as it is no longer current (i.e., digitize it and send it to storage as soon as it arrives).
Design for Experience: Use the newly recovered square footage to expand the sales floor, build a more comfortable employee break area, or create a dedicated station for processing online orders and returns.
The future of retailing will be about the most agile, organized, and customer-centric retailers in the market, protecting their margins, empowering their employees, and unlocking the full economic potential of their physical stores. By understanding the full costs of physical clutter and removing non-value-adding materials from their backrooms, retailers can do just that.
