More crayons than crayola (buyers do it to us again)

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Tonight, one of our projects was to empty out one side of a gondola that had leftover school supplies in it yet, fill what we could to the salesfloor, and then backstock the rest.

This took just about the entire night to do, because there was a ton of school supplies still in there. We had to empty out whole sections in backstock to put all the school supllies, making other sections look like a mess.

Just for a laugh, I checked out our on-hands on some stuff and compared them to other stores. The results:

24-count Crayola crayons: 3,202 on hand. Other stores generally had less than 1500 on hand.
2-pocket portfolios (the cheap kind that sell for a nickel each): 8,994 on hand. Other stores had 5,000 or less.
Elmer's glue: over 700 on hand. Other stores had 350 or less
10-count Crayola markers: over 350 on hand. Other stores had 100 or less, some were completely out.

And of course, all of this crap has to sit in the backroom until next year, when we'll just get a bunch more of the same stuff in anyway. Either our BTS sales went in the tank this year, or the buyers went nuts. I suspect the latter because we were very busy during BTS.

I propose a new law: if buyers buy more merchandise than the stores can sell, then the buyer has to store the excess merchandise that didn't sell at his or her house.

[Becks]

I'm telling you, your store should have "In Store Specials" to get rid of the excess.

Oh, wait, that might make some sort of sense... Never mind...

[Cyanocobalamin]

Yep, same scenario here. Our warehouse is sending us plenty of leftover BTS stuff, and we have lots of it, and less than no room to store it. The other day I got in an entire pallet of pencils. I'm talking a couple thousand packages. Today I find out they are on clearance.

Today I got in like 400 5Star pencil pouches. 24 will fit on the shelf.....
We're not getting the important stuff... like several binders have been out of stock for 2 weeks and others claim to be in stock, but are nowhere to be found and management is too lazy to key them out. Keep scanning it for the outs list, and I'll keep circling it.


The 24ct Crayola crayons? We had around 2000 before BTS. Now we have..6 maybe? Did you have a special Crayola displayer? My store did. It was a friggin black hole, just made of orange cardboard. It could be filled, filled, filled, and filled again and would still fit product.

[El Barto]

Y The other day I got in an entire pallet of pencils. I'm talking a couple thousand packages.

It's things like that that make me glad I work in a small store. The last thing we got a whole pallet of was Bounty 8 packs.

We had trouble getting things we needed for BTS too. They sent us several dozen cases of printer paper. And almost none of it sold, even when it was on sale. But did we get a lot of things like filler paper, notebooks, pens? No, that would make sense, and we can't have that.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

The 24ct Crayola crayons? We had around 2000 before BTS. Now we have..6 maybe? Did you have a special Crayola displayer? My store did. It was a friggin black hole, just made of orange cardboard. It could be filled, filled, filled, and filled again and would still fit product.

We didn't have a special display for those. Some of the crayons came in PDQ displayers. The rest came in regualr cases and we would open those and fill the PDQs alrady on the shelves.

It took almost an entire gondola in backstock to fit all the BTS stuff we pulled off the floor. And we still have all those portfolios on a pallet in the bulk area, along with pallets of notebooks and filler paper. Eventually, that will all have to come down and be backstocked to make room for other things. I'm guessing we'll be getting in some jewelry armoires and curio cabinets that we will only sell for the holidays, and then clearance out.