A product is sitting on the shelf, moving more slowly than expected and getting closer to expiration. Somewhere else, there may be demand for that same product. For a retail chain, that could mean another store has a patient waiting for it. For a health system, it could mean another facility is using the product faster than expected.
The inventory is there, and the demand is there. The question is whether there’s enough visibility to connect the two while there’s still time to act.
Data contributed by Inmar Intelligence to the latest HDA Factbook shows why that question matters. Unsaleable returns continued to decline in 2025, reaching 2.68% of total returns, compared with 3.11% in 2023. But that improvement wasn’t consistent across the supply chain. Retail unsaleable returns declined from 2.90% in 2024 to 2.34% in 2025, while hospital returns moved from 2.93% to 4.62%.
Those numbers aren’t a scorecard. They’re a reminder that inventory challenges—and the opportunities to address them—can look very different depending on where products are being managed.
Visibility has a different job to do in each setting
At retail, tighter ordering and inventory controls can help keep excess product from building up in the first place. Greater attention to expiration dates can also help teams spot products while there are still options to dispense, transfer, or otherwise appropriately manage them.
A health system faces a different visibility challenge. Inventory may be spread across central pharmacies, automated dispensing cabinets, operating rooms, infusion centers, clinics, and other sites of care. Add changing demand, shortages, recalls, and formulary changes, and keeping inventory aligned across the system becomes considerably more complicated.
The goal in either environment isn’t simply to know where a product is. It’s to recognize when something is changing while there’s still time to respond. At retail, that might mean seeing that a product isn’t moving as expected and identifying demand at another store. Within a health system, it could mean recognizing that inventory is building at one facility while another is using the same product more quickly.
That’s where visibility becomes more useful: when it provides enough context to support the next decision.
What you have matters as much as how much
There’s another layer to the returns data that reinforces this point. Reducing the number of units returned doesn’t necessarily produce an equivalent reduction in return dollars.
At retail, average annual unsaleable return units declined by roughly 10% from 2024 to 2025, while the average dollar value of those returns declined by less than 2%. Higher-cost branded, specialty, and other premium products can represent relatively few units while contributing disproportionately to return dollars.
For retailers, that makes product mix an important part of understanding returns performance. Fewer unsaleable units can be a positive sign while a relatively small number of higher-value products continue to have an outsized financial impact.
Health systems have their own pattern to investigate. Their average return units remained relatively stable from 2024 to 2025, while average return dollars declined more meaningfully. The data alone doesn’t tell us why, but it does show why neither units nor dollars should be viewed in isolation.
The industry benchmark is the beginning, not the answer
The national numbers provide context. An organization’s own data is where the picture becomes more specific.
For a health system, that could mean identifying the manufacturers and NDCs generating the most returns, then looking at quantity, value, product mix, location, par levels, and return reasons for patterns worth investigating. A retailer can take a similar approach, using insights from its pharmaceutical returns program to understand where inventory is repeatedly becoming unsaleable and what may be contributing to it.
The questions will be different because the environments are different. But in both cases, the return itself can provide information about what happened earlier.
A declining industry return rate is good news. The more useful question may be what’s happening underneath that number—in a particular store, facility, product category, or NDC.
Because better visibility isn’t simply about seeing more inventory. It’s about seeing the right information early enough to have more choices about what happens next.