Our Inns

Most people are finishing off their main guest season at this point and perhaps settling down to consider what lessons they might carry forward to next year.

One key thing is the idea of rightstocking. Whilst you don’t want to overstock perishable items over the summer you also don’t want to run out of essentials through understocking. Unfortunately, that’s not an easy balance to strike as often the end of the season comes quite abruptly.

For example, in our own case we found that this year we were running almost fully occupied right through to the final days of the season. Whilst the money coming in is obviously useful, that pattern of booking makes right-stocking very difficult indeed. All of a sudden we found ourselves dropping from almost 20 breakfasts in a morning down to four. Thus instead of going through half a box of sugar in a morning we were down to half a bowl and likewise for everything else.

That pattern is fine for things that have a fairly long shelf life but even cornflakes doesn’t come with a shelf-life of more than nine months or so thus the boxes of cereal that we have left are likely to last that little bit too long. Things like butter may only have a shelf life of a month or so which matters quite a lot eg in our case we went from using 20 butter portions a day down to just four so what we previously used in a day now lasts a week. However, even for the non-perishables such as wine you don’t want to be carrying too much stock over into the following year as it just ties up money you could use elsewhere and, of course, makes it more difficult to roll out any format changes that you might be planning.

For a change, we find ourselves almost exactly rightstocked this year with most things although more by chance than design if truth be told. In practical terms we’re lucky in that we’re small enough to be able to munch our way through the things that are likely to reach their sell-by date before any guests would get around to eating them but if we were just a little larger that wouldn’t be a runner.

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