Why is Shelf Availability Still Such a Challenge in 2026?

A bank holiday Monday just passed in Ireland, and while I was in a popular café chain, I noticed that there were half empty shelves in the chilled food section around midday, but there was still quite a bit of activity in the shop. Many people were sitting around in the city centre location as if it were a standard week day. There were groups of people chatting with each other, young and old, some people reading books, others on their phones.


I hung around the queue, not joining immediately as I wanted to see the lunch options. Shoppers were rooting around in the customer-facing fridges looking for sandwiches, paninis, toasties, that would usually be there but today weren’t. After joining the queue, I only ended up ordering a coffee, without getting a sandwich but it got me thinking about shelf availability again, a topic I regularly discuss as an advisor with VisionR. The demand was here, the café was full, but the food options weren’t there. All of this footfall, and the café was not capitalizing, leaving unsatisfied customers and money very firmly on the table.

My mother had a similar story for me around the Christmas period. She wanted to buy a few of her favourite ready meals from a local enterprise supermarket chain, as she had family coming over for lunch on the same day. She walked down to the store at around half ten in the morning, with the intention of buying. But on arrival, she saw that the chilled food shelves were nearly empty. She approached an employee to ask if they were all out ready meals, and the employee promptly checked the back. A few minutes later, the employee returned with quite a few ready meal options, some of which were the ones that my mother assured me were the ‘best’ ones from that particular range. She told me that if she hadn’t asked, she would have left empty handed.

Every branch of every retail chain will have its own challenges, of course. There will be things we as a shopper will never know. Was there supposed to be a delivery of stock that morning but it got delayed? Was the manager in charge of stock taking (before anything goes out on the shelves) on annual leave that day? Were there other supply chain, staffing issues, or emergencies going on that prevented shoppers having access to the goods they were looking for?

Maybe the store was fully stocked but deliveries, in-store pickups and early risers just got there ahead of the johnny-come-latelys. Allocating stock across multiple channels is one of retail operations biggest challenges and can lead to disagreements amongst managers across the branches. I remember working for a luxury retailer that had sister branches. There would be calls every other day from one of our larger branches, asking for us to courier them some high ticket items that we had, that they needed for themselves. They were cannibalising our stock to boost their own margins, leaving us in the lurch so to speak.

For store teams to get insight into where money is being lost each day, they would need to have access to quantitative data, showing where shoppers are arriving in store, and what they are looking to purchase. Sales alone will only show what was bought, not what could have been bought. Analysing shopper baskets will show what items are frequently purchased with other items, giving real clues into how shoppers behave. If a store is out of tortilla chips, maybe a sharp decline in humous, guacamole, dipping sauces, cheeses, will likely follow.

It’s reductive to say that shelf availability simply leads to lost sales when the real decline is in the overall store experience. Customer satisfaction, where too much time is spent in a store, building a basket that ultimately isn’t complete, can be the hidden damage. There is one shop local to me that I shop in most of the time, but there is another competing supermarket not too much further away, where I never have trouble filling a shopping basket, so much so that I actually enjoy when I have the time to go on a shopping trip there.

Store operations teams will know all about the bottlenecks that appear between stockrooms and shelves. Failed replenishments, human errors, and lack of available staff all contribute to popular items stacked nicely in store rooms rather than shelves. The technology and data is there, but aligning real-time visibility, staff tasking, and co-ordination at a store’s busiest periods, are the main blockers.

Megha Singh, a retail technology strategist pointed out recently on her social channels that “Modern retailers are shifting from forecast-centric planning to signal-centric planning: Most retail planning systems are trained on historical POS data that already includes stockouts and forced substitutions. That creates censored demand signals. The model learns “low sales = low demand,” when the real signal was “no inventory = no sale.” Her conclusion is that it’s not a logistics problem, but a decision problem, noting that modern retailers are shifting from forecast-centric planning to signal-centric planning.

On one of the most recent Retail Tea Break Podcasts, Melissa Moore spoke with Alex Considine Tong, Chief Product Officer with Retail Insights, who said the gaps between system stock and what’s actually on the shelves are a major challenge for retailers. There could be blind spots within stores that are just not being seen at board level. She concluded that “turning data into clear action is the most obvious solution.”

Shelf scanning solutions represent a kind of blue sky thinking approach for many retailers but shrinkage, misplaced items, closed off aisles, replenishment delays, and more can all result in data inaccuracies. For a simpler and more cost-effective approach, a store can simply measure foot traffic and departmental traffic to respond to cues day-on-day.

Are we getting the right shopping profiles in the right areas? Great, as this should lead to sales that are on par with what we’re used to. Are we not seeing corresponding sales on our live store platform? Ok, this means something’s wrong and a staff member should investigate. Store ops can be as simple as this, without flooding a store team with information, especially in grocery or department stores where thousands of transactions can occur a day from hundreds of thousands of potential shoppers.

It would be great if every shelf was similar to a vending machine, where as soon as one item is removed, the same product is then pushed forward, although we do see this with some items on shelves (soft drinks for example). But retail is not a science. On shelf availability fluctuates, promotions can cause purchasing spikes, and any number of unpredictability’s can occur on any given day.

Flick Collingwood from Less is More Consulting, which specialises in FMCG partnering, is a big proponent of simplicity in decision making. She encourages retailers not to over complicate even though there are countless ways of getting lost in data. Her predictions on the 2026 retail landscape all centre around customer-centric approach. There’s no better way of having your store customer-centric, than by knowing who is in store, each day, when and where. This is the only way to ensure shoppers are finding what they need.