| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 行銷與流通管理所 === 90 === Facing today’s competitive environments, retail stores are working so hard for outperforming their competitors by various kinds of means. Product display is one of the most crucial factors to the success of retail store management. Although product freshness is an important consideration during consumers’ buying process of fresh milk products, academic literature has not provided too much empirical information of this concern. Currently, most retail stores use first-in-first-out method (FIFO) to display their fresh milk products. The question is whether change of product display (i.e., last-in-first-out; LIFO) has influences and creates better results on retail store’s image and sales performance. Thus, this research intends to provide a better understanding of the impacts of change of product display (i.e., FIFO vs. LIFO) on store image and sales performance.
In one of the five largest convenience chain stores (CVS) in Taiwan, this research performs an eight-week product display experiment on 24 CVS retail stores, including 13 experiment stores (LIFO) and 11 contrast stores (FIFO). The experiment products are 8 family-size fresh milk product items (1000 cc. and 2000 cc.) of two national brands. Before-and-after-experiment questionnaires are used for data collection. Two samples are collected: a pretest sample (40) and a formal test (326). During the experiment, several elements are considered and controlled for ensuring experiment quality.
Overall, the research findings show that LIFO is significantly better than FIFO in store image, sales, and gross profit. However, FIFO is slightly better than LIFO in net profit. Even though net profit is slightly lower in LIFO, most attended retail store managers have positive attitude toward LIFO. They think that in the long run, LIFO should be adopted. The author urges that CVS corporations may consider using LIFO to replace FIFO in their fresh milk product display. Three suggestions are made to CVS franchisers for encouraging franchisee to adopt LIFO:
(1)Improving ordering skills and systems to reduce expiration rate,
(2)Utilizing POS systems in more efficient and effective ways, and
(3)Emphasizing long-term advantages from store image to sales and net profit.
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