You know at the end of sales when items still haven't been sold? what do shops do with them?

[BigButtons]

I don't get what happens to them. Logically they should reduce them in price until they are sold. Do companies chuck goods away- sell them on somewhere else?
Surely every unsold item is profit lost and selling something at a greatly reduced price has to be better than not selling it at all?

Landfill. Pulping. Burning.

If there’s whole lines of products they can be sold on to other retailers. Some will go to the effort of changing the labels etc, there’s a market for ‘dead stock’ sales.

A lot of retailers will destroy items.

Some will donate to charities/recycle the materials.

Some things stay on sale for several years and get dragged out repeatedly, although storing things is expensive.

Sell to Catalogue shop
Tk Maxx

TK Maxx, charity shops, outlet stores and landfill

Everything £5 type shops.

Or they store them for the Next sale.

I think it is called ‘cabbage’ - it is the basis of TK Maxx’s business model. They buy it up.

Some might get relabelled. Some might get landfilled.

They won’t drop the price below a certain point cos it damages the brand.

I was listening to something on radio 4 about this the other day. I'll try and find it.

Some go to Seconds type shops (remember Seconds Ahead?) sold at cost for market stalls etc.

They sell to discount stores/charities, although I seem to remember reading about high end designer stuff being destroyed rather than sold at discount

That's terrible. Years ago I found a ring I really liked but it was waaay over budget e.g.£1000. I never saw them go on sale (and I looked about a hundred times 😄). Would they melt them down I wonder?

Shelf space is at a premium. Why have a shelf filled with reduced items which don't sell when you can have a shelf of higher priced selling items.

Sometimes you see whole lines of stock on eBay. One recent example is that Earth Spirit shoes company hit sold and renamed. Old stock was available on eBay

My friend used to manage a Red Cross shop and she said Tesco used to donate clothes to them, but they had to cut the labels out.

Wasn't that Burberry?

Some get brought out sale after sale.

We used to reduce them to 1p and put them at the till, if they still didn't go in a couple of days they went in the bin, unless any staff wanted them for school, brownies car boot etc.

Tk naxx
Clearance shops

Clearance websites

Charity shops

We used to store them and bring them out sale after sale as though they were new stock (predominantly baby or toddler clothes so new customers all the time)

Every so often head office would send a list of product codes for recall -these would get bundled and sold as rags

They have people who take their old stock in the same way that they take the returns from online shopping. Then the stock either appears on ebay or via other cheap/discount retailers.

If they haven’t been sold to some store such as say a Qd or those this and that type shops at the seaside.

They come back to the warehouse where the items are either paid to be destroyed or distributed between staff as freebies.

If it’s just a few things shops tend to just bin it.

A company dh worked at before paid 5k to destroy a type of item as they were not selling. They didn’t want to damage the overall brand by going too cheap or them possibly being sold on by staff. Other times his come home with a car full of all sorts of weird and wonderful things.

Russell & Bromley used to bring out the same sale shoes for every sale!

I would just really hope that they don't destroy it/ throw it away.
I hadn't thought about brand damage. Uniqlo today had loads of puffer coats reduced by a small amount- I wondered what they would do with them. No one was interested in looking at coats.

Jewellery they can definitely melt down and reuse if it's precious metal.
My first job on my career ladder was for H Samuel's and I used to manage the markdown forecast for all the Gerald Ratner stock they took over when they bought out the stores after his famous prawn sandwich quote.

Everything marked down to the minimum margin allowed then the older products (we have reports by season/year in retail planning) returned and scrapped to be melted.

I had a spreadsheet page I ran called Total Scrap, which we used to affectionately call Total Crap. 😂😂😂

Some of it will go to the outlet shops. I know a few people who’ve worked for brands like Hugo boss and Ralph Lauren, the crap that just wouldn’t sell was often packed off to the outlets at a higher than bargain bin price and it would fly off the shelves. People thought they were getting a bargain there because it was better quality than a messy sale rack 🤷🏻‍♀️

I think they’re all in the Trafford centre….