Current conditions pertaining to truck deliveries to large retail stores in Japan, and efforts to reduce them

Abstract

In the retail industry, the systems used to deliver merchandise and the number of truck deliveries required can vary significantly, depending on the retail segment and the individual store. Merely by addressing stores where the number of deliveries per unit of floor space is more than one standard deviation above the average for their sector, and reducing the number to a level matching the sector average, we calculate that truck deliveries could be reduced by 2, 700 per day. This would be a very significant change, and it is equivalent to around 5.5% of the total number of truck deliveries to large retail stores in Tokyo. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.