The Plight of the Buyer

Retractions. Corrections. Life’s full of them.

Sorry I haven’t posted in over a week, but I’ve been correcting deficiencies in our web site in my spare time recently. (There weren’t that many errors, but they were time-consuming to fix.) There hasn’t been much spare time, because you (our wonderful friends and customers) have been keeping us busy with an influx of orders. Customer sentiment remains overwhelmingly favorable toward www.lemaxvillages.com.

And I need to retract one tidbit of erroneous information. The Oct-o-Squeeze is actually part of the Spooky Town village collection, not the Carnival Series. (Actually, you can use it in either line.) It’s a spooky carnival ride and pairs well with the Spooky Town Fun House.

The menacing octopus is whirling around riders who bear striking resemblances to Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula. If you use it in your “normal” Carnival Village, just tell your friends there’s a convention of movie monster look-alikes in town this week. (Yes, that’s plausible. Just look at all the Star Wars and Star Trek conventions that have taken place in the last four decades. Frankie and the good Count have been around twice as long!)

The Plight of the Buyer

What’s the most difficult part of on-line retailing? Pricing? Logistics? E-commerce? Customer service? They’re all tricky, but I think prognosticating how much to order is right up there among the most challenging aspects of retailing.

When I was but a pip, still wet behind the ears and fresh out of college, I spent 18 months working at a world-class men’s retail clothing store in New Orleans. What I hadn’t learned about sales from the school of hard knocks up to that point, I learned at Rubenstein Brothers, corner of Canal and St. Charles. (Stop by and say hi to Mr Andre [Rubenstein] for me.)

I was chummy with the head buyer for the men’s furnishings department and spent a lot of time with the Rubenstein Sister, Miss Gertrude, who bought men’s ties. Because of the enormous selection, whenever they’d return from a buying trip, they’d mention how hard it was to choose what and how many of each to buy. The evidence of their failures was manifest during the semi-annual clearance sales. If they mis-bought, we had lots to stuff to move at lower and lower prices. The message was clear: buy the right stuff in the right amounts.

Comparatively speaking, our job is a lot easier than theirs. Although the Brothers wouldn’t fire their sweet sister, the head buyer’s neck was, theoretically at least, on the chopping block. Carol and I buy virtually every new item that Lemax releases each year, so what to buy is cut and dried: everything (with few exceptions).

But how much to buy is the $64 question. We have certain rules of thumb that we employ, and those have served us well over the years. Our goal is to have enough left over after Christmas and Halloween to carry us over till the next container arrives on that slow boat from China. We started this current selling season with just under 2000 stock-keeping units (SKUs), and we’ve sold out of several dozen items, so we carry around 1900 SKUs as of this writing.

Our container has landed, the merchandise is on the shelves, and we’ve placed our (final) follow-on order for this year. (The factory stops making more products in September each year so they can re-tool for the following year’s items.) We’ve used previous years’ sales figures to forecast current year sales, by SKU. We use spreadsheets and graphs, diving rods and tea leaves. We approach the art of buying very scientifically.

Then, someone comes along and blows all that out of the water! I’m not complaining, believe me, but a customer this past Saturday bought me out of two varieties of trees that we sell. She ordered 24 of one and 20 of the other.

Rationally, it doesn’t matter to whom we sell our stock. Rationally, we want to sell completely out of everything. Hence, ideally, every year we would sell exactly the number of each SKU that we order, and we would have no pent-up demand, no unsatisfied orders. Of course, that never happens.

Irrationally, we hate to be out of any item, especially this early in the selling season. (Fortunately, these weren’t the most popular or sought-after trees in our inventory.) We pride ourselves on having the largest number of Lemax SKUs in the known universe, so we hate to disappoint any customer.

Anyway, short of ordering a million of each SKU, I guess there’s no good solution to an occasional anomalous order that entirely depletes our supply of that item. We should rejoice, and we are. We shouldn’t fret about 1/10th of one percent of our inventory, but nonetheless I wonder what Adrian Monk would do in this situation.