A visit to the supermarket can present a shopper with a bewildering array of choices. For ice cream alone, the consumer faces a variety of brands, flavors, container sizes, and types (fat-free versus low-fat versus premium, and so on).
At the same time, deciding which items to stock is a formidable problem for retailers. They have a limited amount of shelf space, yet the number of different products in a particular category can be overwhelming. Moreover, they must cope with constantly changing consumer tastes and increasingly rapid turnover in the products available. One survey of five stores, for example, reported the introduction of 129 ice-cream products and the removal of 118 items from this category during a recent 2-year period.