As you all - ....um. Ok. Gilberto? Is that you back there? This is technically a meeting for management only, and you just stock the lawn and garden department once a week, so I'm not sure what you are doing here. I didn't even realize you could receive email. Does this mean you are getting emails, but can't read? I'm confused. Alright. It's ok, though.
Anyway, I chose to bump the the normal end-of-year strategic meeting up a month in light of some disturbing news. Our quarterly sales figures were poor. Again. We've had three straight quarters of declining sales. Maybe more. To be honest I never looked at reports for the first six years. One thing, though, is clear - we have been losing market share.
Back in June, as you may recall, we undertook an initiative to collect customer feedback, in the form of the comment cards at all the registers. Five months later, that project has taught us very little. Only three people took the time to respond, and two of them - or maybe it was even just one filling out two cards - simply wrote "You suck!" with some sort of thick, pastel brown crayon.
So. What do we do? Hire a bunch of pretty girls to work the registers in bathing suits? No. I looked into that, of course. Turns out that idea was already taken by the coffee shop a few blocks down.
What we need is an original idea...or at least a spin on something conventional. And I have just the thing. What month is it right now? That's right, Dana, it's November. And we're - wait, Dana? What are YOU doing here? You work at the goldfish counter. Are there any managers here?
Alright, we're going to call another meeting to deal with this developing issue, but for now I'd like to continue my thought because I was just getting on a roll. As Dana said, it's the beginning of November. Well, we are going to use the calendar to gain a strategic advantage on our competitors. We are going to start our Christmas sale, tomorrow. For Christmas 2010.
That's right. Most department stores have begun the ramp-up to Christmas '09 by now. Oh, there used to be a time when they respectfully waited until after Thanksgiving to start with the carol music and the stocking stuffers, but somewhere along the line Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas all got jumbled into one big tangle of spending, and the boys at Target and K-Mart found a way to capitalize. Well, we're going to take that shameless tactic to the next level. I've already printed the ads for the Sunday paper. Have a look:
"Every year you tell yourself you won't procrastinate with gift-buying, but here it is November already and, sure enough, you find yourself fighting the second-to-last-month crowds. Sound familiar? Beat the rush for Christmas 2010 at QualMart."
Why will this work? Because people love the idea of an early sale. They just love to beat some sort of implied rush. Well, never in the history of retail has there been a sale more than a year ahead of time.
And the real genius, the real beauty, is this: we won't even have to mark prices down. We'll simply call them "inflation-adjusted." At QualMart, we are experts in inflationary outlook! Even our unlimited returns/exchanges policy can't backfire now.
But we can go even further. In addition to playing Christmas music sporadically throughout the year, we're going to have pre-sales for all other major holidays as well. Our Labor Day sale will now happen Easter weekend, and Valentine's Day items will be rolled out in late July. In Las Vegas, there are no clocks or windows in casinos, so you never know what time it is. Well, when you're in one of our stores, you'll never even know what season it is.
So...that was the big news. I also have an item here about "pay cuts" but that should wait for the next managers-only meeting. You're all dismissed.
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