What makes this hard
Retail decisions are small, frequent and unforgiving. Price, assortment and staffing get revisited constantly, and the cost of getting one wrong is spread thinly enough that nobody notices until the quarter closes.
- Margins are thin enough that a rounding decision is a real decision.
- Pricing and assortment repeat weekly, so anything manual compounds.
- Store-level and head-office numbers disagree, and nobody can say which is right.
Start with pricing
Groundtruth turns what customers actually said about value into a price you can defend, which is the part most teams are doing in a spreadsheet. Assortment and workforce work usually starts as an engagement, because it has to meet your existing planning systems where they are.