Seafood stall clerk - the iced-seafood display and FIFO SOP: burial depth, gills facing out, new stock pushed under old, three fixed midday moves

Write an "Iced Seafood Display and FIFO SOP" for a seafood stall
clerk - one page, laminated, posted at the worktable.

1. Display rules
- Burial: fish mostly buried in crushed ice with the back showing -
  "belly on ice, back out," no centimeters (nobody measures
  centimeters; everyone can see a shape). The ice holds the
  temperature; the back shows the customer the species
- Orientation: heads one way, gills facing out. Checking gills is
  the customer's first move on iced fish - presenting the easiest
  thing to verify sells better than hiding it
- Stacking: no more than [blank] layers, set in-store - fish
  crushed at the bottom deform and warm, the root of bottom-layer
  spoilage
- Same species live and iced side by side: separate placement,
  separate price cards. Mix them once and the price mismatch
  becomes a dispute

2. Three fixed midday moves (times set in-store; the moves are
fixed)
- Re-ice: top up when melt passes one-third; double the frequency
  in summer
- Flip: turn the counter over every [N] hours, bottom layer coming
  up - an un-flipped counter spoils precisely where no one looks
- Cull: while flipping, pull out sunken-eye, dull-gill, or
  no-bounce fish into markdown or write-off. Three checks only:
  eyes, gills, flesh bounce

3. FIFO execution
- New under old: fresh arrivals enter from the bottom / rear of
  the counter; older stock pushes forward to the most visible spot
- End-of-day check: flip the whole counter before closing, split
  keep-worthy from not, and mark down or write off the rest on the
  spot - no overnight gambling
- Keep-or-not: same-day arrivals in good condition may stay for
  morning; overnight stock always goes to markdown - "iced sells
  the same day" is a ceiling, not a stretch goal

4. Red lines (standalone, never mixed into display rules)
- No misting the iced counter to "keep it fresh" - that is
  vegetable-counter practice; iced seafood wants dry cold, and a
  room-temperature water film accelerates spoilage
- Dead fish lifted from the tanks never return to the iced counter
  - dead stock travels the markdown / write-off channel; one
  backflow to full price costs the credibility of the whole counter
- Iced never displayed among live, live never laid on ice - two
  price systems mixed in one display is a dispute waiting to
  happen

Format: one A3 folded or A4 page, tables first; [blank] values
filled in-store.

Why it is written this way

Every rule on this one page points at the same spoilage law: iced seafood goes bad where the eye cannot reach - bottom layer, stack depths, meltwater. Burial is written as the shape standard "belly on ice, back out" rather than centimeters because nobody carries a ruler at the counter while everyone can check a shape at a glance. Of the three fixed midday moves, the flip is the most important and the most often skipped: it does temperature turnover and FIFO's physical execution at once - skip it, and every day the counter reads "fresh on top, incubating below."

"Gills facing out" is a quality-and-marketing double win: customers verify iced fish by eyes and gills, and presenting the verifiable part substitutes display for verbal assurance - a gill color the customer sees with their own eyes beats ten sentences of "arrived today." Most stalls orient for looks; this one orients for verifiability.

"'Same day' is a ceiling, not a stretch goal" sets the tone for the closing check: the default answer to keep-or-not is "don't keep," with keeping as the exception. Write "keep if in good condition" and execution drifts toward "looks fine, keep it" - overnight iced stock is the counter's most common slow bleed of credibility.

The no-backflow red line stands alone because it is the clerk's easiest "thrift" mistake: a dead fish lifted from the tank feels wasteful to throw out, so it slides onto the ice - one motion that wagers both the dead-and-live suspicion and the counter's credibility. The point of a red line is to close off exactly the moves that look reasonable in the moment.

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