Inventory Illusion report

A grocery store can say an item is “in stock” in its system and still miss the sale when the shelf is empty or the picker cannot find it. RETHINK Retail and OrderGrid’s new report says that gap, not just bad counts, is driving inventory errors in stores. (rethink.industries) The report, “The Inventory Illusion: Turning Inventory Accuracy into Confident Grocery Execution,” was published in 2026 and says grocers often post high inventory-accuracy rates in software while store teams still face stockouts, substitutions, and missed fulfillment. OrderGrid says the report was co-authored with RETHINK Retail. (ordergrid.com) Its argument is that the failure point is often execution: whether goods were replenished to the shelf, whether store conditions changed after the file updated, and whether online orders can actually be picked. The report says grocers are closing that gap by feeding “real-time store execution signals” into planning, forecasting, and fulfillment. (ordergrid.com) That problem sits inside a broader grocery shift toward omnichannel retail, where the same store now has to serve walk-in shoppers, pickup orders, and delivery orders from one inventory pool. Supermarket News wrote in February 2026 that true omnichannel execution reaches into pricing, promotions, inventory accuracy, fulfillment, loyalty, and customer service. (supermarketnews.com) Grocers have improved from the worst pandemic-era supply shocks, but shelf availability is still not the same thing as a clean inventory file. FMI, The Food Industry Association, said U.S. retail out-of-stock rates fell from 10.7% in 2022 to 6.5% in 2023, below the historical 8% level. (fmi.org) Academic and industry research has been making a similar point for years: inventory records can be wrong at large scale, and fixing them can lift sales. A retail industry summary of research by Yacine Rekik, Aris Syntetos, and Christoph Glock said 60% of inventory records in the studied retailers were wrong and that correcting them could raise sales by 4% to 8%. (retailassetsolutions.com) A newer 2025 working paper by Rekik, Rogelio Oliva, Glock, and Syntetos focused specifically on grocery retailing and examined how promotions, perishability, and audits affect inventory record inaccuracy. The paper says grocery is a distinct case because many items are promoted and a substantial share are perishable. (arxiv.org) Other retail technology firms are pushing similar fixes, including predictive forecasting, automated error correction, camera-based shelf audits, electronic shelf labels, and radio-frequency identification tags. Retail Insight said those tools matter because ordering, replenishment, fulfillment, and restocking all depend on the same inventory file. (retailinsight.io) The report’s practical claim is narrower than “use artificial intelligence for everything.” It says store-level signals have to reach planning systems fast enough for a grocer to know whether an item is not just booked in inventory, but sellable, findable, and fulfillable. (ordergrid.com) That leaves grocery operators with an old retail problem in a newer form: the system may be right on paper while the shelf is wrong in real life. The report argues that the stores winning on availability will be the ones that treat inventory as a live operational process, not a static count. (rethink.industries)