Sample Sale craziness

Most people have probably heard of a sample sale, but unless you live in a city that headquarters a fashion company or you have not been in a location during one, you have not witness the craziness that occurs. Sample sales, depending on the type of product, can be high quality or low quality or a little of both. they are sold for about the cost of the product, if not cheaper. The products are usually still in the corrugated cardboard boxes that they came in and so are the 100 other units that reside in that box. It takes a lot of patience to shop at a sample sale. Sometimes you find a diamond in the rough, but usually it doesn't become yours without a fight from some other girl/guy.

I work at Liz Claiborne and presently in the accessories department. So I manage any Fashion Accessory (gloves, hats, scarves, socks, etc.), handbag, small leather good, or jewelry that we sell. In our accessories division, we have over 15 brands and within those brands they could have all or one of the above. Today we had a sample sale for about 5 hours. Boxes and boxes of stuff throughout our lobby. It is only open to our associates, but there is no limit that you can buy. Until today, I have never worked a sample sale. I manned the register for about 3 hours.

It's pretty funny to see (mostly) women fight over handbags, especially our most sought after brand, Juicy. Because of the size of our lobby, we cannot place all the product out there at the same time. So whenever the get rid of so much, we bring out another box of goodies. The vultures wait around for that next box and grab the product once it is opened up.

The prices range from $1 to $60, depending on the product, people would come up with 20 handbags. It's crazy, I don't know what they do with these products. Some give them as gifts, so donate them and some resell (although that is illegal to do so). While they are in line, they try to negotiate the price and the guy counting what they owe, Bertie, gives them no leeway. The lines are non stop. Its cash only. for the whole time I was there, there was about 5 minutes in total where someone wasn't in line! By the end, we practically give it away just to finish up. And this one was pretty successful. We ended up making $10K on product that is basically obsolete.