Walk your top two hundred items through your digital channels every Monday.

It is Monday, eight in the morning, and one person on your team has the week’s job. They open the digital channels the way a shopper would, choose the first of five stores, and work down a list of 200 items: the fastest-moving fresh lines and the staples, the milk, eggs, bananas and ground beef that fill most carts. For each item they record three things. Does it show as available at that store. What price does it show. Is this week’s promotion on it. At the same time an associate in each of the five stores walks the same 200 items on the shelf and writes down whether the item is there and what the tag says. By noon the two lists sit side by side, and every item at every store is a match or a mismatch in each column.

Why Monday, and why these items.

FMI and the Hartman Group’s survey of 2,023 shoppers finds that a US household makes 2.8 grocery trips a week and uses 5.4 banners in a month. One of those trips is the weekly stock-up. The others are fill-in trips for the two or three things the household ran out of. The fill-in trip is decided on a phone, in the car or at the kitchen counter, and it turns on whether the store nearest me has it right now. The 200 fastest movers are the items the fill-in trip is made of. Monday morning is when the weekend has emptied the shelf and the new weekly ad has gone live, so it is the hour when the shelf and the digital channels are most likely to disagree.

What the release says you will find.

In this release, 13% of the 200 grocers show a live stock level for an item at the shopper’s chosen store. 56% say only in stock or out. 32% say nothing about stock at all, and none has reached Leading, where the shopper is told before they ask. Search is at Advanced or better at 62% and filters at 70%, so the shopper finds the item in seconds and learns nothing about whether it is on the shelf. Expect the availability column of your Monday table to be the worst of the three. Nobody in the building has seen it before, because the digital team reports the catalog, the store reports the shelf, and no report puts the two side by side.

The weekly ad is where they part company first.

21% of grocers keep the member price online in step with the shelf tag. 30% show no member price online at all, and 50% show a member price that is a fixed figure, whatever the shelf says this week. The promotion itself is more often aligned than the price. 48% keep promotions consistent between the store and the digital channels, and 32% publish a weekly ad the shopper can add to the cart from. The merchant negotiated supplier money against that ad. Kroger’s annual filing puts its alternative profit, mostly retail media and data services sold to suppliers, at 1.5 billion dollars of operating profit in a year, a measure of how much supplier money rides on what the household sees. When the deal shows on the shelf and a different price shows in the cart, the supplier funded a promotion the online shopper never got, and the store associate settles the difference at pickup with a printout. Your Monday columns find that first. The supplier’s audit finds it at the next negotiation.

Fresh needs a fourth column.

Fresh is where an availability match can still be a broken promise. 5% of grocers, nine banners, show a date for the pack on sale, and 65% show no date at all. FMI’s State of Fresh Foods puts fresh at 42% of grocery sales and finds that 9.3% of fresh sales are made online. So for the fresh items, have the associate note the date on the front pack too. An item on the shelf with one day left is a match in the availability column and a refund on Thursday.

How to read the table without blaming the store.

The first instinct is to rank the five stores. Resist it. Sort by item and then by cause. A mismatch has one of a few causes. The item sold through after the last count. The price feed did not take the week’s promotion. The store did not change the tag. The store never carried the item and the catalog does not know. Each cause has a different owner: the supply chain leader for the count, the merchandising leader for the calendar, the commerce leader for the feed, the store for the tag. The same cause across five stores is a system problem. The same store across many items is a store problem, and even then the store was working from the data it was given. Count mismatches per 200 items per store per week, and bring that number to the merchandising meeting.

Four Mondays give you four tables and a pattern. One cause will account for more mismatches than the others, and it is more likely to be the price feed or the count cadence than anything a store did. The chapter’s decision asks for live stock on these 200 items in twenty stores, on the product page and in the cart. The Monday walk is how you find out, for the cost of one associate’s morning, whether the stock signal or the price feed is the fix worth making first.