Stupid Product Alert!

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Another shipment of that white powder from Columbia has arrived, and our furniture buyer is all over it.

Here's the latest item we will be carrying that he thinks will sell like hotcakes: A cheap futon sofa frame. Cheap because it has no arms on it. The arms will be sold separately and will need to be put on the sofa by the customer. There will be 3 or 4 different styles of arms.

I had a sign for the frame in my ad box today, and the frame will cost $70. I figure the arms will cost that amount or close to it. We have two other futon frames that are 99 or $110, and come with the arms already on them.

What the buyer apparently does not understand is that most of our customers will not pay extra just so they can say they "customized" something. This is why we cannot sell the mix-and-match lamp bases and shades we have, but we always sell a lot of boxed lamps. This is why we cannot sell our dining sets consisting of a table and any of 4 different styles of fabric or leather-upholstered chairs, but our plain old dining sets with one table and 4 plain old wooden chairs always sell good.

I swear this is like selling fire extinguishers with no foam in them--you have to put the foam in yourself, and for the foam you can choose shaving cream, Reddi-Whip, Cheez-in-a-can or silly string.

[powerboy]

That is how my boss is. He will order just the things that him and his wife has heard of. And he complains because they are not selling. I wonder why?

[Andara Bledin]

My boss buys some bizarre stuff at auction sometimes.

Things he has bought that we have abandoned or scrapped include: 2 50ft container loads of kangaroo meat, several containers full of packaged crappy spa mud, several cases of a promotional Clix game figure, and the entirety of Radio Shak's remaining CueCat stock. Although we sort of sell the CueCats.

^-.-^

[JustADude]

Heh... hopefully you got some good eatin' out of the kangaroo meat before it went bad!

[TNT]

Heh... hopefully you got some good eatin' out of the kangaroo meat before it went bad!

Tie me kangaroo down, sport, tie me kangaroo down.

[Andara Bledin]

Nope. The meat was slated as not allowed for import into the US (I think the original import company screwed up their paperwork, which is why it ended up being sold at a customs auction) and by the time we got to it, it was at the limit of it's expiration dates.

We nearly had it sold to a pet food supplier in Canada, but the deal just couldn't go through within the time limit we were stuck working with.

^-.-^

[Jack7957]

Former job I had, the owner decided we would sell binoculars. Because when you want a set of binoculars, what type of store would you think of going first? That's right! Your locally owned computer sales and repair shop! Luckily we talked him out of it, but I did get one of the samples he had for free.

[Becks]

Here's the latest item we will be carrying that he thinks will sell like hotcakes: A cheap futon sofa frame.

People in southeastern WI know that THE place to go for futons is Brady Street. Hell, they even had a story about that here in the (NJ) Star-Ledger.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Well, I don't live in Milwaukee, but we do sell a decent number of futons, especially when they go on sale. They're nice for apartments.

Once again I am going on the record saying that these will not sell well, especially if the price for the frame and arms exceeds the price of our regular futons.

I did look up Brady Street Futons and they have some really nice ones.

[Becks]

Well, I don't live in Milwaukee, but we do sell a decent number of futons, especially when they go on sale. They're nice for apartments.

And a little bit more comfortable than a sofabed.

[Boozy]

Oh, I could play this game all day.

Here's a sampling of the ridiculously expensive crap we'd sell at the wine store:

Plastic wine glasses for the patio - $10 each.

Leather gift bags lined with faux fur (in the shape of a wine bottle so you can't ever use it for anything else) - $20!!!

Cheap plastic wine glass charms, the exact same kind you could buy at the dollar store in the same plaza....only ours were $8 instead of $1.

Head office blamed the sales staff because we weren't selling any accessories.

If I ever meet the person in charge of purchasing and pricing for that company I'm going give them a good shake and ask "What the hell were you thinking?!"

[Witch of Endor]

Funny, I would think the 'customizable' futons and lamps would sell well. I love the mix-and-match lamps and shades at Ikea.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I guess it depends on well off the people in the area are. My area isn't all that well off. It's hardly a slum but it's not very affluent either.

[Bella_Vixen]

People in southeastern WI know that THE place to go for futons is Brady Street. Hell, they even had a story about that here in the (NJ) Star-Ledger.

I never knew that.

[BookstoreEscapee]

Former job I had, the owner decided we would sell binoculars. Because when you want a set of binoculars, what type of store would you think of going first? That's right! Your locally owned computer sales and repair shop! Luckily we talked him out of it, but I did get one of the samples he had for free.

I have learned recently that you can get binoculars from Barnes & Noble...for when the reading glasses just aren't strong enough?

You can also get a radar scrambler...I got them in my trouble receiving last week and brought it into the office and everyone was like "Do we sell that?!" I wonder how many states they're illegal in...

Other unusual stuff for a "Bookseller"...a fire starter kit with little kindling sticks and wax pinecones in a metal bucket, a wire trivet, projecting clock/thermometer/weather station thingy (it has a little projector so you can put the time on your wall or wherever you want), giant candlesticks...of course none of this stuff comes in with the proper tags on it like the vendors are supposed to do so I end up having to search for them. We had a bunch of stuff for the Mother's Day Gift Guide that got received barely 2 weeks before Mother's Day because none of it had ISBN tags (apparently the company thought they were somehow saving time by not stickering it themselves; problem was they didn't put the ISBNs on the boxes, either; the buyers were very not happy about that one.) and all the boxes got sent to trouble receiving who sent it to my department and then they stuck a bunch of them on a pallet and then no one told us it was ours, and several boxes got put with the sample books my departmet gets, and we wouldn't find them in there until we worked through the stuff that got there first, unless of course someone (read, me) notices that there's a box that belongs in trouble receiving and starts looking through them - turned out to be 25 boxes in the wrong place. Gah! Sorry, rant over.

edit: as far as I know, a lot of this type of stuff is only available through the website, in case you were wondering why you never saw that in the store