Before the Tills Go Quiet: A Reorder Audit for Late 2026

Mid-December at a trade counter has a rhythm all of its own. The seven o'clock rush thins out, regulars start saying see you in the new year, and by eleven the phone has largely given up. Then January turns up and, for a fortnight at least, it stays that way.

That stretch is where stock quietly goes wrong. Not dramatically — nobody loses a fortune on a single pallet of sand — but a dozen small decisions made on autopilot can leave you standing in a cold unit in February looking at a shelf of things nobody has asked for since November.

The usual culprit is the reorder. It gets placed because it always gets placed, on the same day, in the same depth, and the system says the minimum has been hit. Nobody argues with the system in the middle of a busy week.

December is really two months

The first fortnight behaves like a normal trading period with a bit of festive noise on top. Blokes are finishing jobs before the shutdown, sites want materials before the gates close, and there is a genuine late flurry of small, urgent purchases.

From roughly the 18th onwards it is a different business. Trade demand drops off a cliff, walk-in traffic shifts towards gift-shaped purchases — torches, multi-tools, gloves as presents — and the big-ticket lines that carry your margin sit untouched because nobody is starting a new project in a fortnight.

Reordering on a single setting through both phases is how you end up overstocked on the wrong things at exactly the wrong moment.

Where the money tends to get stuck

Every counter has its own version of this list, but the patterns are fairly consistent across the trade:

• Exterior and weather-dependent lines. Fence treatment, decking oil, exterior masonry paint, landscaping sundries. A mild spell can move them, a wet one kills them dead.
• Bulk volumes of fast-moving fixings. The 5kg box of a size you sell three of a month is not a bargain, it is a deposit on a shelf.
• High-value power tools bought as a range rather than a line. If you have bought breadth to look impressive, the slowest two will still be there in March.
• Odd sizes and specification variants. Imperial, extra-long, the specialist fitting that one customer needed once.
• Consumables bought on a carriage-paid threshold rather than on demand. You saved the delivery charge and spent three times as much on stock.
• Seasonal PPE and cold weather kit. Genuinely useful in a snap, dead weight in a mild one.

A pause list you can run in an afternoon

You do not need software for most of this. You need an hour, a stock report and the discipline to act on it.

1. Pull eight-week sell-through by line, not by department. Departments flatter themselves. Lines tell the truth.
2. Flag anything that has not turned in eight weeks. Ask one question of each: is this seasonal timing, or is it just slow?
3. Check supplier cut-offs and reopening dates. Most will be shut for longer than you think, and the first delivery back is not always the reliable one.
4. Protect January cash deliberately. Work out what you genuinely need to trade through the quiet weeks, set the number aside, and treat the rest as fair game for reducing.
5. Cut depth before you cut breadth. A shallow shelf of eight lines reads better than a deep shelf of three. Customers notice gaps far more than they notice smaller quantities.
6. Clear the obvious dead stock now, not in the January sale. Bundle it, price it, put it by the till. Anything still sitting there in February has cost you twice.

Don't hollow the place out

There is a version of this advice that ends with a bare counter and irritated regulars, and it is worth avoiding. Trade customers are loyal to shops that have the thing they need on a wet Tuesday. A customer who drives to you at 4pm for a specific elbow fitting does not want to hear that you tightened up for Christmas.

So keep buying the boring core — the fixings, sealants, tapes, blades and fittings that underpin most jobs. Trim the ambitions, not the essentials.

What is still worth buying

Pausing is not the same as stopping. There are two decent reasons to place a late order on proven lines.

First, supplier price movements. A number of manufacturers push through increases in the first quarter, and buying before that on lines you know you will sell is simple arithmetic rather than speculation. The key word is proven.

Second, negotiated terms. Suppliers with stock sitting in their own warehouse in mid-December are often more flexible than they will be in March — better settlement dates, sale-or-return on selected lines, free carriage at a lower threshold. That is worth a phone call, provided you are buying something that moves rather than something that fills.

Write it down

Before you shut up shop for the break, make a short note of what you paused, what you cleared and what you were left holding. It takes ten minutes and it turns next December from a guess into a plan.

Nobody gets this perfect. The point is not to predict the slowdown to the day — it is to make sure that when the counter goes quiet, your stock position is a decision you made rather than one that happened to you.