If you have trouble reading that Rods you can borrow my glasses.
I apologize in advance, no disrespect to anyone involved.....
but this reply really did make me laugh. Not expected after I had waded through the previous posts !!!
Yes, sorry about the large print, but the warning that I had exceeded 600 characters came up and I tried to modify the quote I was referring to. Well, it all went horribly wrong after that with me losing my temper as I typed my lengthy reply for the second time as an auto delete was actioned !!!!!
The fact it is in bold has nothing to do with the intended tone of my post. I just dislike people being contrascending with me when I am just trying to use my considerable knowledge in an area that paid me a very good salary due to my senior retail business manager abilities. I can be very wrong with other subjects, but retail, no!
I would also add for Rod's benefit that in my position within a national retail company I had to justify our stock holdings and be fully accountable for any write offs or downs (stock price reduction) sustained that ultimately reduced our profits on the P&L. If a line didn't sell well, or was fast heading towards it's sell by date, I was accountable for write downs. On the majority of our stock no Sale or Return was available, and that is why retail companies in the UK at least have to mount "clearances" , "sale's", or eventually put stock into the waste skip. If full SOR was availble the profits for us retailers would be higher, but manufacturers would have to sustain ruinious write off's themselves, and cover all the costs of returned goods. No, the usual practice is for manufacturers to initially give enhanced discounts to the national retailer to allow for any "wastage" on their products to ensure you as the retailer still acted favourably towards them with future stock purchases. In the electronic product market that I have also considerable experience in, that was also the case, with it all being on firm sale. But as the gross margins on our printers from all the major manufacturers could frequently be as low as 5% to be competitive in a very cut throat market, we had little room to manoeuvre . Overall though we made the high margins on printer cartridges and toners, so that assisted greatly in the efforts to produce maximum profit levels. Once more very few products in our ranges were bought in on SOR agreements. It was Firm Sale all the way on the vast majority of our product ranges, which included furniture.
The write down of product is assessed in line with the initial margin enjoyed, and the clearance price falls in line with that. However, it is always the policy to ensure the first cut was the best and only cut in price to gain speedy sale through. The supermarkets now tend to send their restricted sell by or best before dated packaged product to food banks now. If SOR applied to all those goods as Rod states, then that stock would just go back to the manufacture for full credit, and thus the retailer would retain full margins; if only that was the case, retailers like me would be enjoying far higher bonuses!!