Organisational resources that offer great prospects for strategic value are often attached with a high cost and/or risk of deployment. This affects everything at the store level. From a cost point of view, commodities such as fixtures, utilities and even most products are in simple terms bought and sold. Truly strategic resources - real estate, supply chain and POS infrastructure, the employee workforce are not acquired, managed and retained quiet easily. When you consider provisions of the value that all these resources offer, there is a likewise trend. Commodity resources are a reality of life. They are vital to business, but they hardly get you apart from your competitors. The effect of strategic resources, such as the employee workforce, extends far beyond maintenance of the sales floor and stockroom. In reality, they influence the entire function, including product availability, quality of customer service and ultimately overall business profitability. Management of strategic resources is further complicated by the scattered nature of the retail enterprise.
Labour costs have always been considered as the retailer's greatest controllable expense and this fact is only exaggerated by today's challenging market environments. The underlying irony is that corporate and production demands do not match with decreasing sales, nor does customer demand decline if department staffing is scaled back.
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