Customers see a few pages of products and discounts. Behind them lie months of planning, competitor analysis, negotiations, logistics and hundreds of operational decisions most people never see.
Most people open a flyer at the kitchen table, over coffee. Their eyes skim the front page, settle on a price that looks good, maybe circle two or three things for the shopping list, and the flyer ends up on the pile with the rest of the post. The whole interaction lasts a minute, maybe two.
For years, I was on the other side of that minute. I worked in procurement for a major retail chain, and what was a single page to the customer was, for us, a project that had started months earlier and passed through dozens of hands before anyone ever saw a price.
Customers see a flyer. Retail sees a project that runs for months.
This isn't theory. It's a look behind the scenes from someone who built those scenes — from the first line in a spreadsheet to the pallet that failed to reach a store at exactly the wrong moment. I'm deliberately avoiding textbook definitions, because the textbook describes how the system is supposed to work, and I'm describing how it actually worked.
A Catalogue Isn't a Marketing Flyer. It's a Project.
The first thing to understand is this: a weekly catalogue isn't a marketing exercise with discounts bolted on. It's a commercial project with deadlines, a budget, risk and consequences — and the marketing is only the part of it you eventually see.
The timeline is what surprises people most. The flyer that lands in your letterbox on Wednesday wasn't put together last week. In practice, a weekly catalogue is prepared roughly two to three months ahead; retail studies point to a sixty- to ninety-day development window before the drop, which matches what I lived. The big seasonal catalogues — Christmas, Easter, back-to-school — start even earlier. Some were planned half a year out, because for certain items you have to order the goods and lock in volumes while it's still summer outside.
The reason is simple. A promotion isn't a discount on something you already have on the shelf. A promotion is an agreed volume, at an agreed price, delivered to an agreed deadline, distributed across stores and backed by enough stock to survive a surge in demand. All of that takes time, and time is planned backwards — from the launch date to the day you have to send the order to the supplier.
The catalogue is regular sales on steroids.
That's how I always thought of it, and the steroids don't just amplify volume. They amplify everything at once. The responsibility is greater, because one wrong call no longer costs you a few units but an entire pallet. The operational pressure is greater, because everything has to happen in a shorter window. The forecasting risk is greater, because the bigger the volume, the more an error costs you. The dependence on suppliers is greater, because now a single truck can make or break the whole promotion. And the financial exposure is greater, because your money is tied up in stock that has to sell in seven days, not whenever it happens to move. Everything you do calmly and gradually in regular sales happens faster in a promotion, in larger quantities, with almost no tolerance for error. Get a forecast wrong in regular trading and you fix it next week. Get it wrong on the front page of the catalogue and the whole system sees the mistake, and sees it immediately.
The Customer Sees a Product, the Buyer Sees the Whole Category
When a customer looks at a promotional price, they see one product and one number. When I looked at that same price, I saw several numbers behind it that never get printed in the catalogue.
A customer sees a product. A buyer sees margin, volume, index and turnover.
Margin told me how much I was earning on that item — or how much I was deliberately giving away. Volume told me how much I'd committed to sell and, by extension, how much risk I was carrying. The index showed me how that item and that category were performing against previous periods and against plan. Turnover told me how quickly the goods would convert back into cash. The customer never sees any of those numbers, and together they decided whether that product would make it into the catalogue at all, and at what price.
I have to be precise about one thing here, because it's often portrayed wrongly. In the organisation where I worked, procurement led the commercial decisions. Procurement negotiated with suppliers, procurement defined the promotional strategy, procurement selected the products, and procurement directed category management. Category management was, above all, an operational and execution role — shelves, planograms, the layout on the shelf, the delivery of what procurement had already agreed. The books will often tell you otherwise; they'll present category management as the strategic brain of the whole operation. In my reality, the brain sat in procurement and the execution sat in the category. I'm not claiming it works that way everywhere; I'm telling you it worked that way where I sat.
And that's exactly why a promotion was never a conversation about a single item. It was a conversation about a category. Which product goes on the front page and pulls traffic, which one protects margin, how much space we give a particular subcategory, how one promotion affects the sales of everything around it. Promoting one product while sinking the sales of three next to it isn't a win — it's an expensive mistake that only looks good in the report for that one item.
The Competition Is the First Morning Read
If I had to single out one habit that best describes the job in procurement, it would be this: competitors' catalogues were the first thing I looked at in the morning. Before email, before meetings, sometimes before I'd taken my coat off. The competitor's flyer was my morning read, and not out of curiosity but out of necessity.
It got worse than mornings. There were evenings, the night before important negotiations, when I'd check competitor prices late into the night — not because anyone asked me to, but because responsibility doesn't stay at the office when you go home. I'll admit something that's rarely said out loud: insomnia and procurement go hand in hand more often than any of us would care to confess. When you sit down with a supplier the next day to agree a price and a volume on an item headed for the front page, you can't walk into that room without knowing what price the competition went out with. That kind of vigilance isn't a weakness. It's the job you couldn't leave on your desk because it didn't fit inside working hours.
One of the most common questions in procurement was never “What price can we offer?” but “What price did the competition go out with?”
The two questions sound similar but lead to completely different decisions. The first looks inward, at your own costing. The second looks outward, at the market. And in promotional pricing, the market almost always beats the costing, because the customer doesn't compare your price to your cost — they compare it to the price across the street.
That constant monitoring wasn't a personal obsession of mine; the whole industry works this way. Today there are expensive tools that automatically gather flyers and compare prices per unit; we did the same work by hand, in spreadsheets, item by item, late into the evening. What the industry now calls the “price gap to competition” and carefully builds into software, we did on instinct and on a quiet fear that someone would undercut us by a single cent on the wrong item.
Promotional pricing may be the biggest pricing game in all of retail. On key items, a difference of a single cent can matter, because these are the products by which a customer decides whether the whole store is cheap or expensive. That's why you don't check the competition once a month but continuously, and why a promotional price is always a decision made on the move — against a target that keeps moving too. The research backs this up: when one chain drops a price, the others typically react, at least partly following suit. Anyone who's sat inside that whirlwind knows that “promo war” isn't a phrase — it's a description of the working week.
Why We Deliberately Gave Up Margin on Promotions
People on the outside don't always see why a retailer would sell some things at almost no profit, sometimes below it. The answer is that the front page of a catalogue usually isn't about making money on that item at all.
The point is to get the customer into the store. An aggressively priced hero product is bait — it pulls traffic, and the profit is made on everything else the customer drops into the basket once they're there. The trade even has a name for it: the loss leader, an item you lose on in order to win elsewhere. The logic is cold and accurate: one cheap product on the front page is worth as much as the average basket it drags in behind it.
That's why a promotion is measured more by volume than by margin. We chose items that didn't just move their own volume but pulled the rest of the basket along with them — products customers respond to and that trigger additional purchases. The key items, the most visible ones, can account for as little as a fifth of sales, yet they shape the price perception of the whole store out of all proportion. Drop the price on the right item and you've changed how shoppers see the entire store; drop it on the wrong one and you've simply handed margin to someone who would have bought the product anyway.
That's the difference between a promotion that looks good and a promotion that is good. The first has an attractive price on the front page. The second has an attractive price on the front page and still delivers traffic, basket and perception — and that's decided at the procurement table, months before the customer ever sees the number.
The Front Page Is More Than a Spot on the Page
A supplier once genuinely expected the same order as the last time — because the last time, they'd been on the front page of the catalogue. The logic seemed airtight to him: same item, same price, so presumably the same quantity. I had to explain what's almost invisible from the outside: it wasn't the item that had sold that volume. The front page had.
Not every position in a catalogue is equally valuable — not even close. The front page doesn't display a product; it changes the customer's behaviour. The same item on the front page and the same item on page eight are two completely different jobs, with different volumes and different risk. Move the product a few pages deeper and sales can fall by half, even though the price hasn't budged.
Suppliers almost always underestimate this. They read a strong result as proof that their product is excellent, rather than that it was carried by the position it sat in. So they want to repeat that same performance from a worse slot, at the same price, and they're sincerely surprised when it doesn't materialise. A past result isn't a promise for the next one. It was the sum of price, position, timing and whatever the competition was doing that exact week — and the moment one of those variables drops, the number drops with it.
That's one of those lessons you only learn after years of sitting on the other side of the table: in a catalogue, it isn't only the product that sells. The position it sits in sells too.
Never One Catalogue — Always Several at Once
Here's the image I'd most like to stay with you after this piece, because I think it best explains why this job is what it is.
At any given moment, we weren't preparing one catalogue. We were preparing several, each at its own stage.
One was already at the printer — locked, irreversible, physically being reproduced while we worked on the rest. One was being finalised, the last checks on prices and dates before it went to print. One was waiting on prices, because negotiations with suppliers weren't yet done. One was waiting on photography, because without visuals there's no page. One existed only as a skeleton, a layout of themes and categories without a single concrete price. And one was only just beginning, an empty spreadsheet and a handful of ideas.
And the stage a catalogue happens to be in when a change lands alters everything. While the catalogue is still taking shape, a change is awkward but manageable — adjust a price, swap an item, rework the page and move on. But once the catalogue is in its final phase, every small change sets off an operational avalanche: one price moves, and after it goes the planogram, then the order, then the store allocation, then the promotional materials — all of it while the clock ticks loudly towards a print slot that won't move. So you learn a quiet skill in procurement: knowing up to which point a change is just work, and from which point it becomes a problem.
All those catalogues lived at the same time, on the same desk, in the same head. And each had its own deadline that didn't shift. While you were putting out a fire on one, the clock was ticking on three others. The printer doesn't wait. A supplier who's late with a price doesn't move your launch date — it just shortens the time you have to arrange everything else.
That sense of juggling several projects at different stages, where none is allowed to fall, is the closest description I can give of the real rhythm of procurement. The customer sees one flyer a week and thinks it's one flyer. Behind that single flyer stand five or six others in various states of incompleteness, and every one of them will, in a couple of weeks, also become “just one flyer” that someone opened over coffee.
The Forecast That Gets It Wrong
Before every promotion, we had to estimate how much we'd sell. Everything else hung on that one number: how much to order, how much to send to which store, how much stock to hold back just in case. And that number, however carefully it was built, could still be wrong.
How did we arrive at it? We'd start from last year's sales of the same or a similar item in a similar promotion. We'd layer the index on top — how much the category is growing or shrinking against last year. Then we'd look at the weather, because hot or cold can flip the sales of entire categories in a single day. We'd look at regulatory changes, because those too can shift demand overnight. We'd look at what the competition was doing in those exact days. And finally we'd add the thing you can't put in a spreadsheet — a feel for the product, built over years.
And then, every so often, something would happen for which there was no explanation. A promotion that had cleared the shelves the year before would, on the same item, the same price, the same position in the catalogue, simply fail to take off. Nothing measurable had changed, and the number was half of what it should have been. You'd hunt for the reason for days and never find it. The customer, for some reason that left no trace, had simply decided differently that time.
That's probably the biggest lesson I took from procurement: part of retail behaviour simply can't be fully predicted. You can have the best data, the tidiest spreadsheet and ten years of experience, and the market will still surprise you now and then, without warning and without apology. “We had a forecast and we missed it again” isn't an admission of failure. It's an ordinary Tuesday in a job where the only truly certain figure is the one that hasn't arrived yet.
An Empty Shelf Is the Most Expensive Page in the Catalogue
There's a single scenario that causes more unease in procurement than a bad price, and that's a product from the catalogue that isn't on the shelf.
The customer saw the price, came in for it, and found an empty space. In that moment you don't just lose that one sale. You lose trust. A customer who came specifically for a promotional item and didn't find it isn't thinking about your logistical challenges — they're thinking about why they bothered coming, and whether next time they'll go to the competitor instead.
The numbers behind this are uncomfortable. Average product unavailability in retail runs at around 8 per cent, but on promotional items it can climb to 20 per cent — one in five customers not finding what they came for. And studies of shopper behaviour show what happens next: some go to another store, some buy a different brand, some postpone the purchase, some buy nothing at all. Every one of those outcomes is a lost sale, and some of them are a lost customer.
The customer doesn't remember why the shelf was empty. They only remember that it was.
This is where the supplier enters the picture, and where a promotion reveals itself as a joint project rather than just our internal exercise. During a promotion, the tolerance for supplier error falls to almost nothing. A truck that's two days late in the middle of a seven-day promotion isn't just two days late — it misses nearly a third of the entire promotional window in the affected stores. That's why suppliers on key items are expected to hold a service level above 95 per cent, and why deliveries during a promotion are watched more closely than usual. A supplier who fails once on a promotion gets a conversation. A supplier who does it twice gets worse terms, or loses their spot in the next catalogue.
I've written in more detail about what suppliers often don't understand about working with retail chains in a separate article — because it's precisely in moments like these, when the deadline and the shelf won't wait, that it becomes clear how far apart the retailer's expectations and the supplier's really are.
Two Sides of the Same Page
If I boil all of this down to a single image, it looks something like this. The same page of a catalogue, two completely different ways of seeing it:
| What the customer sees | What retail sees |
|---|---|
| A promotional price | Months of planning behind that price |
| A few pages of a catalogue | Several catalogues in different stages of production at once |
| A discount | Margin, sales index and competitor analysis |
| A product on the front page | The volume forecast and the logistics behind that product |
| An empty shelf | An operational problem hitting the entire system at that moment |
| A single product | An entire category — index, turnover and profitability |
Neither side is wrong. The customer is right to look at the price, because the price is what concerns them. But behind every one of those prices stands the second column of this table — and it is, almost always, the larger part of the story.
The Catalogue Is a Musical
The best comparison for what I did for years doesn't come from retail at all. It comes from the theatre.
The catalogue is a musical. The audience sees the stage, but never the hundreds of people behind the curtain who have to play their part at exactly the right moment for everything to work.
The audience sees the performance. They see the actors, the lights, the music, a clean show that flows effortlessly. What they don't see is everything else: the months of rehearsal, the lighting that took hours to set, the prop that has to be in the exact spot at the exact second, the people moving the scenery in the dark behind the curtain while the audience stares into the spotlights. If any one of them is late, the show doesn't collapse in front of the audience — not always — but the people behind the curtain know how little it would have taken for it to.
The weekly catalogue is that performance. The price on the front page is the actor in the spotlight. Behind it are the months of planning, the negotiations with suppliers, the mornings spent over competitors' flyers, the forecasts that could have gone either way, the trucks that had to arrive on time and the shelves that had to be full the moment the customer walked in. All of it so that one minute over coffee could look simple.
Even now, when I open any flyer, I no longer see only products and prices. I immediately see the months of planning behind them, the negotiations, the supplier meetings, the forecasts that could have gone either way, the logistics, the shelves and the hundreds of people who each had to do their part flawlessly for those pages to exist at all. Once you've acquired that way of seeing, it never switches off.
And that's exactly why, the next time you open a flyer and your eye settles on a price that looks good, it's worth pausing for a moment to remember: that was never a simple page. It was a musical, and you've only just seen the stage.
