Why though?
If you make it look like there’s only one or two left, people are gonna be more likely to buy an item than if they know they can get the item any time.
365 day a year “Sales” at full price work for a reason.
I worked at [massive corporate retailer] for nearly 6 years and was a manager for a few of those years, so I got to see all sorts of the insidious shit that goes on behind the curtain. One thing they spend a fuckton of money on (and this applies to big box stores grocery stores convenience stores etc) is market research.
One of the things I was shown was how they’ve done research on buying habits exactly like your hypothesis above except it turned out the opposite was true. When there’s only one or two of an item left it causes a huge dip in sales even if it’s rapidly replenished, and there are two reasons it’s suspected this happens; There are people that will think that there must be something wrong with the lone remaining items or are obsessive and nitpicky about for example looking for a longer expiration date or something, then there are also people (and I’ve encountered this exact phenomena) who feel guilty for taking the last one of a given item off the shelf.
Another absolutely psychopathic corporate market research induced practice is that stores will deliberately move shit around and reconfigure item layouts of top selling items to get people to spend more time looking for shit and increasing the frequency of impulse purchases, or that they deliberately put candy and junk food at eye level for children.
Yeah that’s all pretty standard over the decades, it’s only more recent that they’ve been able to develop the more data driven targeted tactics.
Another one is as you mentioned pricing.
First there was the tactic of ending all prices with 99 cents, but people get used to that and just start to round up subconsciously so they learned to start doing % based sales or loss leaders (items sold deliberately at or below cost just to bring people in) then there is the practice of pricing luxury/premium items at flat dollar or even hundred dollar amounts because “you’re such a baller you don’t care about single dollar amounts and definitely don’t care about coinage”
If there’s one or two then the illusion doesn’t work. You basically just bring everything to the front.
It’s all well and good to make it look like it’s going fast but old people out for their weekly shop need to be able to access items quickly and easily.
Every aisle has its own limited time deals on the end anyway so there’s no shortage of FOMO throughout the store.
