I work closeout, which is basically just department store retail at markdown pricing. Think, fancy things for rich people who don't even realize that the economy has been hung like a pinata and beaten until it popped open.
I have a background in wholesale operations management and shipping/receiving management, and I understand why retail companies are doing what they're doing from a business stance, I get it, I just think it's a bit overboard.
We too also started getting Halloween supplies in July/August and now that it's October it's pretty much mostly sold out, we just moved what was left to clearance, Fall/Harvest/Thanksgiving will also be mostly sold out soon and will also be moved to clearance before the actual holiday gets there. We've been getting Christmas however, since July/August as well. -_-...This is particularly annoying to me, because I live in ****ing Florida, where Christmas day can easily be spent surfing at the beach (in fact, I've done that a couple times before myself when I was younger).
Back to the topic though, I think (or rather, I believe) that retailers are doing this to try to push holiday merchandising out of the warehouses, and out of the stores, into the consumers, just before the end of the year internal audit/inventory. Because, if the warehouses are low in inventory, and the store is low in inventory, it is easier and less costly to actually perform the inventory audit at the end of the year. Or at least, that's my understanding of it.
I DO however think that it's definitely getting a little bit out of hand on the operations end of it. Because unless you've been in management for several years that kind of a curve ball hits you as "What the **** is this ****?!?" And even for people who have been in management for several years, it's still that way.
Largely in part because most established retailers in the U.S. just eat their losses and rotate the living **** out of the staff as if business itself were a conceptualized financial black hole (which is actually kind of ironic, if you think about it). Part of the issue comes from a translation error between computer generated numbers and statistics of estimated man hours required for operations based on a series of beta testing calculative standards that spit out some theoretical number of an estimation standard status quo. And the reason why that doesn't work, is because when theory is applied every store and staff is different, has a different trending rate, and comes with different geometrics to the building and space available, and has different staff related issues hither and dither. So in short: Theory applied, it doesn't work like it's supposed to because there are far too many variables (cue gaping black hole opening up here).
But no company anywhere whats to admit to having a faulty structure with a bullet-hole riddled set of problems to it because that "doesn't look professional" but in all actuality that actually IS the professional standard once you get out into the field and get your hands dirty with the actual work and stop ****ing off in fantasy land on some pedestal behind a computer. So they don't really say anything about it because it's professionally embarrassing to not have a good answer.
Or to break it down to satire, the corporate ladder basically looks like this:
Until you finally get to the guy at the top, who looks like this most of the time (and is looking up at the sky screaming: "WHY GOD!?! WHY!?!?):
At least until he royally ****s up, and then looks like this thereafter instead:
And that's my general theory on retail, wholesale, and basically business structure everywhere in America in satire form.
Linear Mode
