STALE SALE!

Sales in retail stores in India peaked on 26^th January. Newspapers carried full-page advertisements announcing even an unbalanced offer of ‘Buy 4 Get 7 Free!’. Reputed companies advertised their offers in their supermarkets and hypermarts, competing with each other! It was as though the world was coming to an end and there could be no other opportunity for these stores to clinch sales! A few years ago the Future Group hit upon its most popular annual Republic Day Sale. The maiden event was scheduled only for one day - on the Republic Day (sabse sasta din) - and it may yet remain green in our memory that there was a big scramble to gain entry into the Big Bazaar stores, almost resulting in a stampede. Later the event was planned to span over a period of a few days (sabse saste 5 din). 

Competing organizations I felt have run out of ideas and opportunities that they had to respond immediately too, to counter competitive moves! I often think that competing organizations like Reliance are so big and rich with retail talents that they do not have to toe the line with competition but could create many innovatively differentiated events to achieve greater sales in various time frames. Now the Republic Day has come to be more associated with SALE than with parades and celebrations. Gone are the days when people gathered in public places to celebrate the Republic Day but now they gather in queues in front of retail stores and malls expectantly waiting for their doors to open! This 26^th January, newspapers carried full-page advertisements that were very similar to each other in body copy and one could hardly remember or recall to memory which store carried the sale items and in what prices!

I walked into a few malls in the last two days to check out offers. The bargains were great! A couple of reputed apparel brands sported signage at the entrance like this: ‘FLAT 50% OFF’. In my humble understanding, everything that was sold in the stores was at 50% off. But when I was browsing I was disappointed to know that majority of the items were sold at 20% off and 30% off! Only a kids’ brand lived up to its claim of selling all the merchandise at a flat 50% off! Some genuinely made an announcement that the items on sale were ‘up to 50% off’ and some others said that ‘a lot of stuff were at 50% off’. I left the malls with a sad feeling failing to understand why reputed brands needed to con customers into entering their stores!

There were a very few other stores who stood out from competition, having either gone on sale earlier or waiting to go on sale later. M&S is one such store that did not go on sale during this period of heavy clearance of merchandise but was quietly cashing on the footfalls the malls were bringing to the store as a result of price promotions in other stores.

Quality accidents, shop-soiled merchandise, line close-outs and wrongly bought and accumulated unsold merchandise were always the reasons for organizing SALE in retail stores, but now it has become a strategy to pump up the topline a couple of times in the financial year to achieve budgets and so careful merchandise planning is done to organize merchandise for sale.

Has SALE overtly become a gimmick and a strategic move to increase sales more than being an attempt to clear unsold merchandise or overcome merchandising and operating failures?

- Dr. Gibson G. Vedamani