Operations
The four numbers a hardware store should watch
Turns, fill rate, dead stock, and the one nobody tracks: how often somebody asked for something you should have had.
Sam Prewitt
Head of customer setup
Sep 2, 2026
7 min read
Independent stores drown in reports and starve for numbers. Here are four that are worth a look each month, in the order we would look at them.
1. Fill rate on your top 200
Of the two hundred items that move fastest, what share were on the shelf every day of the month? Not in the building. On the shelf, in the bin, findable. This is the number that decides whether a contractor keeps coming back, and it is the one most stores have never measured.
2. Turns, but only on the fast half
Whole-store inventory turns average away everything interesting. Your slow half is supposed to be slow — that is what a hardware store is for. Look at turns on the items that are meant to move, and compare them to the same quarter last year rather than to somebody else's benchmark.
3. Dead stock in dollars, not items
Six hundred items that have not sold in a year sounds alarming and might be $900. Forty items that have not sold in a year might be $11,000. Sort by money and the conversation changes.
4. Stockout events
Every time a bin hit zero with sales still happening. This is the only number on the list that measures the customer's experience rather than yours.
- Count events, not days — three separate outages hurt more than one long one.
- Weight them by how fast the item sells.
- Look at which supplier they cluster around. Sometimes it is not you.
If you track one thing, track that last one. Everything else on this list is a way of explaining it.
