Two costs that point in opposite directions
Changeover work can happen while the shop is trading or after it closes. In trading hours the labour is usually cheaper, but any selling fixture being worked on is out of action, so a feature table under construction earns nothing for the hours it takes. After hours the fixture keeps selling all day and the labour costs more.
Which is cheaper is a subtraction, not a preference. For a selling fixture, moving the work out of hours costs the hourly premium and saves the takings you would otherwise lose, so out of hours wins whenever the premium is smaller than what the fixture earns in an hour. For a window bay, which has no takings of its own, moving the work out of hours costs the premium and saves nothing, so trading hours wins whenever the after-hours rate is higher.
Run the defaults and the split falls out cleanly: 84 hours of window work a year at a $5.50 premium is $462 of extra cost if you move it, while 54 hours of feature work saves $34.00 an hour of takings and costs $5.50 an hour of premium, so moving that saves $1,539. Windows in the day, features after closing, and the difference against doing everything in trading hours is over a thousand dollars a year on numbers that are not extreme.
The hours add up faster than anyone expects
Two windows at three and a half hours plus six feature refreshes at forty-five minutes is 11.5 hours a changeover. Twelve changeovers a year is 138 hours — more than three full working weeks of one person, spent entirely on work that does not appear on any schedule as a job title. It is usually absorbed by whoever is in, which is why it tends to be invisible until somebody costs it.
That is also why the per-hour figure at the bottom matters. Labour, lost selling and props together give an all-in rate for changeover work, and it is normally well above the wage — at the defaults, around $41 an hour against a $19 wage. Any decision about doing fewer, faster or simpler changeovers is made against that number, not against the wage.
Getting the takings-per-hour figure right
The feature takings input is the one people fudge, and it drives the entire crossover. It is what one feature fixture actually rings through in an hour of trading, from your own till data, not what the shop takes divided by the number of fixtures. A feature table near the door in December and the same table on a Tuesday morning in February are different numbers by a factor of several, and if the changeovers happen at the same point in every month the relevant figure is the one for that time.
Two things bias it. It is not really zero while the work is happening — customers still buy off a half-dressed table, and some of the stock is simply moved rather than removed. And a changeover often lifts what the fixture earns afterwards, which is the reason for doing it at all and which this page does not attempt to model. Treat the lost-selling line as the upper end of the cost.
The reason to move the work that is not about money
Changeovers mean ladders, step stools, staple guns, box cutters and props that are heavier than they look, and doing that on an open sales floor puts all of it next to customers who are not expecting it and children who will walk under it. That is a reason to move the work out of hours in its own right, independent of the arithmetic above, and it does not become less true when the numbers come out the other way. What equipment is appropriate and how it should be used comes from the equipment maker and from whoever runs your safety training. There is no procedure on this page.
What is a question for somebody else
Whether an out-of-hours hour costs you more, whether overtime applies, how the hours can be scheduled and how the person doing the work is classified are all questions for your accountant and your state labour department. The two wage inputs on this page are figures you supply, and the page applies no rule of its own to either. The employee cost calculator is where the loaded hourly figure gets built up from a wage, and the labor cost percentage calculator puts a whole schedule against a sales forecast.
For the other side of it, the sales per square foot calculator works out what a feature fixture earns per foot, which is where the takings input here should come from, and the store fixture run layout calculator tells you how many feature positions the floor has in the first place.
Questions people ask
Is it cheaper to change displays after hours?
It depends on the fixture. For a selling fixture like a feature table or an end cap, working after hours costs an hourly premium and saves the takings the fixture would have lost while it was down, so it is cheaper whenever the premium is smaller than what that fixture earns in an hour. For a window bay, which sells nothing directly, working after hours costs the premium and saves nothing, so it is more expensive whenever the out-of-hours rate is higher. Most shops do both tasks at the same time of day, and that is where the money is left.
How many hours a year does visual merchandising take?
Multiply out your own figures rather than guessing, because the total is normally much larger than the impression. Two windows at three and a half hours and six feature refreshes at forty-five minutes, twelve times a year, is 138 hours — more than three full weeks of one person. It is usually invisible because nobody is rostered to it: it is absorbed by whoever is on that day, which means it also displaces whatever they were going to do instead.
What should I use for takings per hour of a feature fixture?
Your own till data for that fixture, over the trading hours it was up. Not the shop total divided by fixture count, which will overstate the quiet ones and understate the good ones badly. Be aware of the two biases: the fixture does not really earn zero while it is being worked on, since people still buy off a half-built table, and a changeover normally raises what it earns afterwards. Both push the same way, so the lost-selling figure this page produces is closer to a ceiling than to a best estimate.
Do I need to pay more for work outside opening hours?
That is a question for your accountant and your state labour department, and this page states no rule. What it does is take whatever the hour actually costs you as an input and show what follows from it. If there is no difference in your case, enter the same figure in both fields and the arithmetic still works — the feature-versus-window split then comes down entirely to the lost selling, and after hours wins on every selling fixture.
Should I do fewer changeovers?
Cost them at the all-in hourly rate rather than at the wage, because labour, lost selling and props together usually come to roughly double the wage. Then the question is whether a changeover you skip costs you more in takings than it saves, which is a question about your customers and how often they come back rather than about arithmetic. What the numbers can settle is a narrower version: if a feature refresh takes forty-five minutes and the fixture takes $34 an hour, doing it during trading has to justify about $25 of foregone takings on top of the labour, every single time.