Evaluating Merchandise Management Performance-GMROI As we discussed in Chapter 6, a good performance measure for evaluating a retail firm is ROI. Return on investment is composed of two components, asset turnover and net profit margin. But ROI is not a good measure for evaluating the perfor- nance of merchandise managers because they do not have control over all of the retailer's assets or all the expenses that the retailer incurs. Merchandise managers only have control over the merchandise they buy (the retailer's merchandise inventory assets), the price at which the merchandise is sold, and the cost of the merchandise. Thus, buyers generally have control over the gross Inargin but not operating expenses, such as store operations, human resources, real estate, and supply chain management and information systems A financial ratio that assesses a buyer's ROI performance on the basis of the tac tors that the buyer can control is gross margin return on inventory investment (GMROI, cypically pronounced jin-roy. It measures how many gross margin dollars are earned on every dollar of inventory investment made by the buyer.