New items
There were 16,000 new skus last year. Yet 80 per cent lasted less than a year. You don’t need to be an accountant to imagine the costs associated with this kind of activity. And look how this has changed. Since 1975, the number of new sku introductions has increased eight fold. Yet their life expectancy has shrunk from around five years in 1975 to about nine months now. We can hardly call this progress.