Retailers and suppliers say it didn’t pay to offer products for everyone, and customers didn’t care that much when they stopped
4 min
The furniture retailer Malouf sells beds and bedding in a fraction of the colours it did a few years ago. Newell Brands, the Sharpie maker, has retired 50 types of Yankee Candle. Coca-Cola offers half as many drinks.
Covid slashed consumer choices as companies pared their offerings to ease clogs in the supply chain. The logistical mess is behind them. But many of the choices aren’t coming back.
Retailers and suppliers across industries—from groceries to health, beauty and furniture—have said that it didn’t pay to offer products for everyone, and consumers didn’t care that much when they stopped.
“Today, people would rather lose a portion of consumer demand as opposed to spending extra on too much variety,” said Inna Kuznetsova, chief executive officer of ToolsGroup, a supply-chain planning and optimisation company.
Macy’s president and CEO-elect, Tony Spring, told analysts in November that “the customer today does not want an endless aisle.”
New items made up about 2% of products in stores in 2023 across categories such as beauty, footwear and toys, down from 5% of items in 2019, according to the market-research firm Circana. Shelf Engine, a technology company that automates ordering for grocery retailers, said large grocery stores have reduced fresh-food offerings such as fruit, dairy products and deli meats by 15% to 20%.
Large grocers cutting back on choice is a reversal from pre pandemic days, when they believed they had to carry everything to avoid losing customers to the store across the street, said Stefan Kalb, CEO of Shelf Engine.
Kalb said that grocers are now saving money because they have fewer items to manage and that the slimming of product options is reducing food waste.
Executives at consumer-product companies said the thinning of their product lines has been a relief for those struggling to improve profitability in the midst of higher interest rates and rising costs for raw materials and labor. They said many of the reductions have been in lines that consumers wouldn’t notice, such as items in special packaging and assortments for specific big-box retailers. The cutbacks are also to product lines that drown consumers in options.
“I don’t think any consumer would have noticed we went from 200 to 150” types of Yankee Candle, said Chris Peterson, chief executive of Newell Brands.
Some industry specialists said the new focus on bestselling items has reduced innovation and hurt smaller brands that rely on retailers’ desire to carry something for everyone.
“There has definitely been less innovation since the pandemic,” said Seth Goldman, a founder of the organic-beverage maker Honest Tea, which was bought by Coca-Cola in 2011 and discontinued in 2022.
Coca-Cola over the past few years reduced its brands to 200 from 400, cutting slow-growing as well as declining products, including small regional lines such as Northern Neck Ginger Ale and national brands such as its first diet cola, Tab.
“It was pruning the garden to let the better plants grow,” Coca-Cola Chief Executive James Quincey said in 2022.
Goldman said there was still demand for Honest Tea, even if it wasn’t big enough for Coca-Cola. In September 2022, four months after Coca-Cola’s announcement, he launched Just Ice Tea, a drink that he said is similar to Honest Tea and that is expected to have sales in 2023 of more than $16 million.
Companies began winnowing product lines in the years leading up to the pandemic as a corrective to previous decades when consumer choice ballooned. That was partly because of the internet, where online retailers weren’t constrained by the space limitations of physical stores, giving rise to the term “endless aisle.”
The cuts were turbocharged in 2020 and 2021, when product shortages and a surge in consumer spending led companies to give priority to the most in-demand items. They focused on products that ran fastest on production lines and, because of social distancing in factories, could be made with automated machinery.
Kimberly-Clark cut more than 70% of its toilet paper and facial-tissue products over a single weekend in 2020 as it rushed to satisfy a fourfold increase in demand, said Tamera Fenske, the company’s chief supply chain officer.
Fenske said the company jettisoned slow-selling items as well as many of the special counts and custom sizes it made for individual retailers. Fenske said that, as pandemic restrictions eased, Kimberly-Clark was able to be more thoughtful about the items it brought back. She said the company carries about 30% fewer product lines in North America than it had at the start of 2020.
PVH, which owns Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, embarked in 2020 on a plan to cut more than a fifth of its offerings to focus on what it calls “hero” products—those that make up an essential part of someone’s wardrobe.
Some companies said the culling of less-popular products opened up space for new lines.
Georgia-Pacific stopped selling 164-sheet rolls of Quilted Northern toilet paper because its larger rolls were better for consumers who valued longer-lasting rolls, said Kim Burns, senior vice president of supply chain for Georgia-Pacific’s consumer products group. Burns said the company has subsequently invested more time and money in new product lines, such as toilet paper with a scented tube that acts as a bathroom air freshener.
For other companies, the supply-chain shock provided a real-life experiment in how trimming product lines could improve productivity without hurting customer satisfaction. “It was quite shocking as we parsed it out to see we were using a lot of our buying power to really not get much of a return on investment,” said Nick Jensen, vice president of product at Malouf.
The Logan, Utah-based furniture company has reduced its lines to about 3,500 product choices, down from almost 11,000 items before the pandemic. Jensen said the company is adding new items more carefully these days.
“If we have 15 different colours and three shades of grey, it’s a paralysing choice,” Jensen said. “It’s kind of forced us to be much more intentional versus throwing a lot of things at the wall and hoping that they stick.”
—Suzanne Kapner contributed to this article.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
The bequests benefit charities, distant relatives and even pets
4 min
Charities, distant relatives and even pets are benefiting from surprise inheritances. They can thank people without children.
Not having children is becoming more common, both among millennials and older people. A July Pew Research Center analysis found that 20% of U.S. adults age 50 and older hadn’t had children.
And many of these people don’t have wills. An AARP survey found half of childless people age 50-plus who live alone have a will, compared with 57% of others that age. Those without wills have less control over what happens to their money, which often ends up in the hands of people who don’t expect it.
This phenomenon of a surprise inheritance is common enough that it has a name: the laughing heir .
“All they do is get the money and go, ‘Ah ha ha, look at that,’ ” said Michael Ettinger , an estate lawyer in New York.
Kelley Gilpin McKeig, a 64-year-old healthcare-industry consultant in Ridgefield, Wash., received a phone call several years ago saying her cousin Nick Caldwell left behind money in a savings account. They hadn’t been in touch for 20 years.
“I thought it was a scam,” she said. “Nobody else in our family had heard that he had passed.”
She hunted down his death certificate and a news article and learned he had died about a year and a half before in a workplace accident.
Caldwell, who was in his 50s, had died without a will. His estate was split among cousins and an uncle. It took about two years for the money to be distributed because of the paperwork and court approval involved. Gilpin McKeig’s share was $2,300.
Afterward, she updated her will to make sure what she has doesn’t go to “just anybody down the line, or cousins I don’t care about.”
There are trillions of dollars at stake as baby boomers age.
Most people leave their money to spouses and children when they die. A 2021 analysis of Federal Reserve survey data found that 82% of heirs’ inheritances came from parents.
People with no children say they want to leave a greater share of their estates to charity, friends and extended family , according to research by two Yale law professors that surveyed 9,000 U.S. adults.
Rebecca Fornwalt, a 33-year-old writer, created a trust after landing a book deal. While her heirs are her parents, her backup heirs include her sister and about a half-dozen close friends. She set aside $15,000 for the care of each of her two dogs.
Susan Lassiter-Lyons , a financial coach in Florence, Ariz., said one childless client is leaving equal interests in her home to her two nephews. Another is leaving her home to a man she has been friends with for a long time.
“She broke his heart years ago and she feels guilted into leaving him property,” Lassiter-Lyons said.
A client who is a former escort estranged from her family is leaving her estate to two friends and to charity.
Lassiter-Lyons, who doesn’t have children, set up a trust for her two dogs should she and her wife die. The pet guardian, her wife’s sister, would live in their house while taking care of the dogs. When the dogs die, she inherits the house.
In the Yale study, people without descendants—children or grandchildren—intended to give 10% of their estates to charity, on average, more than triple the intended amount of those with descendants.
The Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles, which manages $1.3 billion of assets, a few years ago added an “heirless donors” section to its website that profiles donors and talks about building a legacy.
“Fifteen years ago, we never talked about child-free donors at all,” said Lew Groner , the foundation’s vice president for marketing.
In the absence of a will, heirs are determined by state law . Assets can wind up in the state’s hands. In New York, for example, $240 million in unclaimed funds over the past 10 years has arrived from estates of the deceased, not including real estate, according to the state comptroller’s office. In California, it is $54.3 million.
Financial advisers say a far bigger concern than who gets what is making sure there is enough money and support for a comfortable old age, because clients without children can’t call on them for help.
“I hope there is something left to leave,” said Stephanie Maxfield, a 43-year-old therapist in southern Colorado. “But if there isn’t, I think that’s OK, too.”
She said she would like to leave something to her partner’s nieces and nephews, as well as animal shelters and domestic-violence shelters. Her best friend is a beneficiary.
Choosing an estate executor and who would handle money and health decisions on your behalf can be difficult when you don’t have children, financial advisers say. Using a promised inheritance as a reward for taking care of you when you are older isn’t a good solution, said Jay Zigmont , an investment adviser focused on childless people.
“Unfortunately, it is relatively common to see family members who are in the will decide to opt for cheaper medical care (or similar decisions) in order to protect what they will be inheriting,” he said in an email.
Kirsten Tompkins, who is from Birmingham, U.K., and works in consulting, along with her husband divided their estate among their dozen nieces and nephews.
Choosing heirs was the easy part. What is hard is figuring out whom to ask for help as she and her husband get older, she said.
“A lot of us are at an age where we are playing that role for our parents,” the 50-year-old said, referring to tasks such as providing tech support and taking parents to medical appointments. “Who is going to do that for us?”
