Does Your Retail Business Have Range Creep: Retail's 'Stock Illusion' (Pt2)

Hi, I'm Clare Bailey, The Retail Champion.

In Part 1 of the Stock Illusion series, we explored the customer-facing cost of over-ranging — the overwhelm, the choice paralysis, the damage to the shopping experience. Now it's time to go deeper.

In this episode, I'm looking at the operational reality of range creep — how it happens, why it feels like good management when it's actually slowly destroying your margins, and what data-driven decisions really look like when you're editing a range.

Because here's the truth: most businesses don't suddenly wake up with bloated ranges. It creeps in. A new line because a category's doing well. Another colourway because the grey one sells. A supplier introducing something low-risk. And before long, the range is running the business — not the other way around.

What We Cover

• Why range creep feels like good management until it really doesn't

• The difference between sales performance and margin performance — and why it matters

• Why retailers develop emotional attachments to products that are quietly killing their profitability

• Product lifecycle management: every product has a beginning and an end

• How exception reporting helps you catch decline before it's too late

• Why e-commerce has made range discipline harder, not easier

• What the best retailers do differently — continuous curation, not annual reviews