Replenishment Failure

My Starbucks ran out of stoppers this morning.  The stupid green stick that keeps my coffee from spilling all over my car.  Wow.
Is it hard to keep in stock of an item that you give away?
Demand= cups X ratio,  where cups = sales fcst X (% hot beverages to sales)
Ratio = average #stoppers given/cups used. 
If you know the sales fcst,  which I bet they do as they likely use for labor fcst  the rest is MATH:
Assume sales is 100, 000 for a month.   (no idea,  made that up)
70% are hot beverages with a price of 4.00. Half of people ask for stoppers.
Demand =((100000 X 70%) /4. 00) X  1/3.  =8750 stoppers needed.   Build in some safety stock to account for lead times.

Now I have to clean coffee off my car seat because someone failed at replenishment.
@starbucks – no charge for this demand forecast lesson. 

-THAT Planning Guy

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