An interview study of 38 supermarket reductions officers becomes the basis for a chain-wide override-form requirement covering every discretionary markdown hold.
An interview study with 38 reductions officers becomes the basis for a chain-wide override-form requirement covering every discretionary markdown hold.
Solveig Adeyemi has spent two interview rounds asking supermarket reductions officers what they call the stock they choose to hold back from markdown before anyone tells them to. Working with Dagny Okafor from the School of Continuous Improvement, she has catalogued the vocabulary officers use for that decision across fourteen stores of one national chain, and tracked what happened to it once head office noticed.
The study drew on semi-structured interviews across two rounds, coded to saturation and independently cross-checked, rather than a supplied list of categories — the vocabulary was left to emerge from what officers actually said. Officers converged independently on a shared set of terms for stock not yet ready to mark down. Once head office required a filed override form for every hold, the number of forms filed each week climbed sharply across the fourteen stores, while officers’ own account of what they were holding back barely moved.
Officers had the words long before we did. The honest response was to let the form catch up to them, not the other way round.
— Dr Solveig Adeyemi, Lecturer, School of Continuous Improvement
Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, says the finding “confirms something the unit has suspected for a while: a workplace’s own words are usually a better instrument than the one built to replace them.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fgok4d.