Placement of items on the shelf space of retail stores signifcantly impacts the revenue of the retailer. Given the prevalence and popularity of medium-to-large-size retail stores, several research efforts have been made towards facilitating item/itemset placement in retail stores for improving retailer revenue. However, they do not consider the issue of urgency of sale of individual items. Hence, they cannot efficiently index, retrieve and place high-revenue itemsets in retail store slots in an urgency-aware manner. Our key contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce the notion of urgency for retail itemset placement. Second, we propose the urgency-aware URI index for efficiently retrieving high-revenue and urgent itemsets of different sizes. We discuss the URIP itemset placement scheme, which exploits URI for improving retailer revenue. We also conduct a performance evaluation with two real datasets to demonstrate that URIP is indeed effective in improving retailer revenue w.r.t. existing schemes. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.