Supermarket stock replacement

Something recently made me doubt the intelligence of the point of sale / backend stock ordering systems at Tesco. For some time now, it has been a source of frustation that the Tesco Metro in White City regularly seemed to sell out of the raspberry yoghurts - leaving us to choose between hazelnut, black cherry and strawberry. The thing is we all preferred the raspberry ones - as apparently did everyone else - they leapt off the shelves.

Now Tesco have actually withdrawn the raspberry ones from sale entirely. This seems completely bizarre. Why get rid of the best selling flavour?

It is possible I suppose that the 20p Tesco yoghurts are a loss leader to get people in - and that they don't actually want to sell that many. But surely having other flavours that actually get thrown away because less people like them costs even more?

technorati tag: Tesco yoghurt