A slow Tuesday in a Tbilisi grocery is often a delivery

A grocery till file can show a Tuesday that looks like the neighbourhood left town. More often the Monday delivery sat in traffic, or the warehouse closed for a public holiday the clerk forgot to write down.

If you feed that trough into a forecast as true demand, the next Monday order comes in light. Then Wednesday looks like a spike, and someone commissions a promotion to “catch up”.

We ask for delivery notes, even messy ones. A handwritten sheet with times is better than a clean file with holes. In Didube, a street repair that blocked the loading bay for two days produced a trough that three stores shared. Treating it as a taste change would have cut rice and oil for a month.

A replenishment brief is allowed to be dull. Dull is accurate. The exciting page is usually the one that forgot the truck.