Jun 26, 2008 11:10 pm US/Central
Good Question: What Happens To Unsold Clothes?
(WCCO)
It seems it just got warm enough to start wearing summer clothes. Yet if you go to the department stores, summer styles are already on sale. Before long, they'll be on clearance, and fall fashions will be on display.
The got Mallory Anderson from Robbinsdale wondering what happens to all the clothing that doesn't sell?
"What do you think they do with clothes after they've gone off clearance and everything?" Jeanette Trompeter asked a passerby in Macy's downtown.
"I have no idea. I guess they send 'em back," answered the woman.
That's kind of right.
"It's just a well-calculated process of where things go and the life of an item when it's in our stores," said Laura Schara, a fashion expert for Macy's.
She says there is a lifespan for every dress, shirt, hat and shoe in the store. It starts with the manufacturer.
"Once it gets here, it's put on a schedule. Sort of a trend-curve schedule of when it will take its first markdown, second markdown," described Schara.
Eventually the item hits clearance level, the
final stage of its lifespan within the store, and it's all determined by buyers at corporate headquarters.
"There's a team of people here that have computerized scanners, and they are hooked up to our merchants computer scanners, and they are hooked up to our merchants computer systems," said Schara.
In the wee hours of the morning, the pricing troops translate new messages that send new prices to the racks.
"Some of our $9.99's go to $4.99 and some of them go to 15 percent off," said one of the workers.
And if the new reductions don't do the trick, "if it comes up as penny stock or $0.00, then we pull it and send it to different areas for processing," she explained.
Clothes that don't go home with customers go to distribution centers.
"Which then, it is either sent back to the vendor, or it's sold to a salvage goods company. Then the salvage goods company has an opportunity to sell it to off-price retailers," said Schara. That's to stores like TJ Max, Marshalls, Ross and others.
Trendy items are likely to go quickest to the retail afterworld while staples stick around longer. But it is a high-tech system that determines the destiny of the clothes we don't buy.
"The moral of the story is, if you like it and it's on clearance, you might want to buy it cause it may not be here tomorrow," said Schara with a smile.
She also said that computerized system is why if you ask a sales associate when something is going to go on sale, they don't have an answer. They really don't know.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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