The S#!T officially hit the fan today...

Wine Pimps
1

Hope all the rest of you are busy, I will be a lot scarcer for the next ten days. It seems there really is a Santa Claus.

THREE local stores were out of double sided gift wrap tape, maybe the recession really IS over?

2

School is still out on this. While my toy retailers are reporting that it’s busy, no one will say for sure if that’s from a pent-up demand, or, is it really busy.
Some stores reported being off 20% in October/November. They have to ring up a lot of sales $ to make up for the decrease in earlier sales.

The good news… retailers will go into January will less inventory than in the past. That’s good for my January sales.

3

The online orders ended Friday and the walk-in traffic officially started Friday. Lunch today was postponed three times. While the numbers aren’t as good as two years ago, they are an improvement over last year. Seeing some new faces and some we haven’t seen since we moved to our new location.

As expected, we had a corporate order where one of the involved parties provided bad addresses. A woman called today to say she received a package for somebody who has moved. Carrie asked if she could e-mail a tag and have it shipped back to us. The woman said to wait, that she had called the number for the recipient on the shipping tag, left a message and will try to get it to the intended recipient. There are still good people out there. [thumbs-up.gif] [thankyou.gif]

4

I’m here at 8:30 in the morning on a Sunday to make new signs for 60 new Iberian wines that arrived Friday plus make 50 gift enclosures for a corporate order where the names of the givers is slightly different on each one (lots of fun, that one, but better do it myself to prevent blowback on mistakes).

Good luck to all on the final week.

5

THREE local stores were out of double sided gift wrap tape, maybe the recession really IS over?

I feel your pain!! I went through Dec with Bartenders 1.75 labels falling off the bottles as you pulled them out of the case. One of the hottest selling liqour gag gifts durring the holidays and the retailers wanted the bottles on the shelf.

Its just as bad as splitting up gift sets after the holidays.