The gifts are unwrapped, the wrapping paper scattered and the last-minute gift-buying frenzy a memory supplanted by the smiles the presents brought.
But four local retailers can’t quite exhale. It’s time to clear the shelves.
The week between Christmas and New Year’s means shoppers returning items, exchanging for size and spending the gift cards they pulled from their stockings. It’s also a time of steep sales, as stores try to rid themselves of unwanted items to free up money for next year’s buying and avoid paying inventory taxes on the unsold gifts.
“We’re trying to get as much out the door as possible,” said Ellen Ward, co-owner of FoxTale Book Shoppe in Woodstock. “Next week is about selling it down as low as we can.”
Ward said she expects to heavily discount entire sections of the store, offering a percentage off every children’s book, for example. While booksellers have the option of returning unsold stock to the publisher, Ward said she would rather sell what she has, even if the price is slashed. It keeps her from paying shipping to return the books, and means she isn’t being taxed on the titles that would have remained in her inventory.
But the cuts are still selective, and there are some books that shoppers won’t find a deal on. Autographed copies of books like “The Help,” or titles like “The Night Circus” that have been selling well, will stay at full price.
Some large Playmobil pieces that may be discontinued will be on sale at Dunwoody’s Picayune Toys, as will work benches and wooden garages that take up a lot of space. Owner Becky Goblish said she would rather make less on the items and use the money to buy newer products then let them languish at full price.
“It’s products we have that we’d paid for long ago. It’s cash sitting on the floor,” she said. “We don’t want cash tied up in those products for another six to eight months, maybe a year.”
Some of the discounts came before Christmas, when people were crowding the store looking for last-minute gifts. Others won’t be marked down until after the New Year, depending on what inventory levels look like. Hanukkah continues until Dec. 27, after all, and Picayune Toys may still get last-minute shoppers on the last night of that holiday.
Popular shoes like Toms and Uggs won’t be discounted at Abbadabba’s, but the five-store shoe chain is still trying to rid itself of an overabundance of odd sizes and older styles. The company rarely has sales, chief financial officer Kristen Smith said, but will be discounting clearance items an additional 15 percent until Jan. 7. Smith said she hopes after-Christmas shoppers will use the discount to add on a pair of clearance shoes to the pair they were coming in for.
The company needs the stock room, but it also needs to free up money to buy new products, she said. The offer is similar to one Abbadabba’s had over Black Friday weekend, but the lesser discount was meant to reward shoppers who came to the store early in the season.
Abbadabba’s has a lot of traffic the week after Christmas, as shoppers exchange gifts of footwear that don’t quite fit, or aren’t the color they want. This year, Smith said, she has had more returns and exchanges before the holiday, but does not know what to attribute the shift to.
A high number of returns can be problematic for the company, she said, because employees receive a commission for the shoes they sell. When items come back to the store, the commission has to be returned, too.
Other retailers said they don’t get as many returns, but they still expect a busy week. Ward, at FoxTale, said it may be easier to re-gift an unwanted book than a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit. Most of the business the week following the holiday is new purchases, she said.
Returns to PeachMac’s eight Georgia stores are few, and there won’t be any sales, owner Darryl Peck said. But he does expect to run out of a number of items, only to reorder them come January.
“If you do it well, you pretty much run out of everything,” he said. “We’ve already stopped ordering a lot of stuff. We’ll run out of some stuff before the end of the year.”
Shoppers likely won’t notice if there are fewer options in iPhone cases at the Apple specialist, Peck said. But they would notice — and did a year ago — when the stores ran out of iPads briefly. It can mean frustrated customers and a hit to revenues, but Peck said that still can be preferable to an excess of unsold merchandise at the end of the year.
“The ideal situation is to have as little inventory as possible when you close Dec. 31,” he said.
Peck expects a busy week, with gift cards being redeemed and customers who are off work taking the time to come into the store. He said the week is a fun one. It’s still busy, but the pressure’s off. Shoppers aren’t in such a rush to get things, so they’re more laid back.
PeachMac and Abbadabba’s will be open on Monday, but the owners at Picayune Toys and FoxTale will stay closed an extra day. Neither Goblish nor Ward said they expected to take much of a hit because they were closed. Most of the other stores in her shopping center will be closed, Goblish said, and traffic would likely be light.
Ward said FoxTale will do inventory that day, and take stock of what sold well and what didn’t. She said she prefers the happiness of the pre-Christmas week to the one that comes immediately after it. This year, customers were particularly thoughtful, she said. Several anonymously bought gift cards for other shoppers, or purchased books for people in the store that they could not otherwise afford, she said.
That’s a lot more heartwarming than managing sales at the end of the year.
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