How is your sale of Lunch meat doing in your market since the down turn in the economy, word is brown bagging is becoming a larger part of consumer behavior.
our lunchmeat is not a very strong seller...we are a BIG fresh meat store....i'd say 75% of our sales come from fresh meat alone....when ordering lunchmeat, we usually don't order unless there is an empty hole....we do have a few things that sell better than others of course,
In our store lunch meats are part of the deli dept. not meat so I wouldn't be sure on that. I do know that we sell through a lot of our in house roasted items like beef and turkey breast. This is also a great way for the deli to use up meat items that we are long on.
I get two brands of my lunch meat from vendors who will reimburse any thing that didn't sell. I also have alot of lunch meat that will just be loss if I don't sell it. I try to order and display only what I am confident will sell. So it all moves pretty well. Occsassionally someone goofs and puts something in the ad that I don't carry so I have to order it and end up throwing it all away after it goes out of date.
As an independent, you can buy into the package meats that are on sale (at a deal price) and then instore retail after the sale, thats more competitive with the aggressive big box stores.
Many meat depts want a 35-40 % margin on packaged meats.....if you can get it...you are lucky, but consider this-most meat depts are targeting 30 % overall margin, with an 8-12% labor factor- but on these low labor package meat items we try to get over 35%
If we were wise, we'd be focusing on "turns" even at 20-25% margins, generating more gross profit dollars.- sometimes we are sooooo focused on that gross margin % as a measure, we cant see the forest from the trees again, these are very low labor easy sales
