One of the keys to surviving this difficult economy is making wise use of every inventory dollar — and that of course means turning slow moving items into cash by clearing them out.

Because my nickname is Orange, we’ve always called our spring clearance sale Orange’s Lemon Sale. (One of my fellow retailers once admired our Lemon Sale window by commenting that I was brave to admit my mistakes in public.)  In addition to using lemon-yellow tags to mark the sale prices, we start the sale by giving free fresh lemons to the first 100 customers.  We also send out a card to our mailing list offering 10% off on a sale purchase with the postcard.

We use dated price tags to track when merchandise has arrived in the store, and these dates also help us decide what needs to be clearanced.  Ideally an item has been marked down at a less drastic discount for sometime before being declared a “lemon.”

This year we added a few new features:

 

• We brought in clearance merchandise that we bought at a deep discount (see Let’s Make a  Deal, my January 12, 2009 blog entry)

 

• Customers on our e-mail list got a one-day head start on the sale

 

• Shoppers spending over $50 are being given a yellow grab bag filled with $3 to $20 worth of  first quality odds and ends

What we hadn’t counted on as a special feature for this year’s sale was 7” of snow on the first weekend day that the sale was advertised to the public.  But when life gives you lemons, it’s best to make lemonade. Before heading over to the store through the snow on Saturday, I used our e-mail marketing program to quickly, and inexpensively, send out a cheery e-mail featuring a colorful snowman and a reminder that if shoppers couldn’t make it into the store right away, the Lemon Sale would continue throughout the week — and that lots of bargains would be waiting for them once they got shoveled out.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder