A School of Emergent Priorities paper reports what happened when a supermarket chain handed its night-fill markdown call to a scanner running one fixed rule.
STAMP fixes a fourteen-site supermarket chain's discount timing at eighteen hours before use-by, and the region has adopted the threshold as policy
Whichever staff member is rostered onto a supermarket’s night-fill shift has, until now, decided when a near-expiry item earns a markdown sticker. A new Slop University paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reports what happened when that judgement was handed instead to STAMP, a scanner built to apply one fixed rule: mark an item down exactly eighteen hours before its use-by cutoff, at a category-specific rate set once and never revised over the trial.
Across fourteen sites of one national supermarket chain’s regional network, the scanner replaced each site’s existing markdown practice for eleven weeks, logging every threshold crossing itself rather than leaving the call to whoever was holding the trolley. The School reports the deployment brought every stock category to within half an hour of the threshold, down from a staff-discretion baseline that ranged as high as six hours, and that mean shelf-waste value per site fell across the same period.
What we found interesting wasn’t the waste figure — it was how quickly a threshold that started as one scanner’s setting became a rule the whole region now answers to.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
On the strength of the pilot, the retail partner’s regional office has adopted the eighteen-hour threshold as its binding markdown protocol, with store managers no longer authorised to apply their own discretion outside the scanner’s decision. Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, said the outcome raises a question the School plans to keep sitting with: what a threshold owes the person who no longer gets to set it.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.n7ws0g.