What is dead stock?

Dead stock is the inventory nobody wants to talk about: the pallet of last season's fixtures, the parts for a discontinued machine, the order quantity that turned out to be triple what the market wanted. It costs money every month it sits there. It occupies bins that faster stock needs, ties up cash, gets counted and insured, and eventually gets written off anyway. The first problem is detection. In a spreadsheet-run operation, dead stock hides because nobody queries "items with zero movement in 12 months." A system with movement history makes the report trivial: sort by last-sold or last-used date, multiply remaining quantity by unit cost, and you have a ranked liability list. The second problem is acting on it. Options in rough order of recovery: return to the supplier for credit, discount to sell through, bundle with fast movers, sell to a liquidator, donate for the tax treatment, scrap. The worst option is the default one, which is doing nothing. A standing quarterly review with a hard rule, such as any SKU with no movement in 18 months gets a disposition decision, keeps the back aisle from becoming a museum.