Shadowdancer
First Post
I've never owned or worked in a gaming store, but back in college (early '80s) I did work in a record store. And I have to say, the suggestions already made about having some sort of inventory system are spot on.
In the store I worked in, part of a large regional chain, we would reorder each week basically based on what we liked, and what we remembered selling. Then we had got a new assistant manager who suggested we start tearing off the product pricing tags which came on all the stuff we got from the company warehouse (this was in the days before bar codes). He said they did it as the store where he trained, and it made a big difference.
So we started tearing the tags off, and using those when we reordered each week. And guess what -- what we thought were our biggest selling items, weren't.
Back then, the large trade publications (like Billboard) based their top sellers charts basically off what the large chain stores reported to them were their top sellers. How did the chain stores gather this information? By contacting the local stores. For our chain, we had a weekly sales report the manager called in each week. Part of that report had us list the top three selling vinyl albums, the top five selling 45 singles, the top three selling 8-track tapes and the top three selling cassette tapes (I told you this was long ago). Then the home office would compile this info from all the stores and report it to Billboard. Just about everyone did this. This is how Casey Kasem got his weekly top 40 countdown.
I remember reading how, in the '90s, record stores started using Soundscan and other systems to track actual sales at each store. This had a huge impact on the best seller charts. Whereas in the '80s, it took a really big-name artist releasing a much anticipated album to hit No. 1 in the first week of release, now it happens all the time. Just some MTV exposure to build a little anticipation, and BAM! You can have the No. 1 album in the land for a week. I remember when Elton John did it the first time, it was like Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon for the music industry. Now it happens on a regular basis.
Which I guess means Casey Kasem's countdowns were probably all wrong, and nobody knew it for all those years.
So yeah, invest in some sort of inventory tracking system that automatically tracks what you sell so you know what your best sellers are.
In the store I worked in, part of a large regional chain, we would reorder each week basically based on what we liked, and what we remembered selling. Then we had got a new assistant manager who suggested we start tearing off the product pricing tags which came on all the stuff we got from the company warehouse (this was in the days before bar codes). He said they did it as the store where he trained, and it made a big difference.
So we started tearing the tags off, and using those when we reordered each week. And guess what -- what we thought were our biggest selling items, weren't.
Back then, the large trade publications (like Billboard) based their top sellers charts basically off what the large chain stores reported to them were their top sellers. How did the chain stores gather this information? By contacting the local stores. For our chain, we had a weekly sales report the manager called in each week. Part of that report had us list the top three selling vinyl albums, the top five selling 45 singles, the top three selling 8-track tapes and the top three selling cassette tapes (I told you this was long ago). Then the home office would compile this info from all the stores and report it to Billboard. Just about everyone did this. This is how Casey Kasem got his weekly top 40 countdown.
I remember reading how, in the '90s, record stores started using Soundscan and other systems to track actual sales at each store. This had a huge impact on the best seller charts. Whereas in the '80s, it took a really big-name artist releasing a much anticipated album to hit No. 1 in the first week of release, now it happens all the time. Just some MTV exposure to build a little anticipation, and BAM! You can have the No. 1 album in the land for a week. I remember when Elton John did it the first time, it was like Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon for the music industry. Now it happens on a regular basis.
Which I guess means Casey Kasem's countdowns were probably all wrong, and nobody knew it for all those years.
So yeah, invest in some sort of inventory tracking system that automatically tracks what you sell so you know what your best sellers are.
