How to Hold a Store Spring Cleaning Sale

If you own a retail store, you know it needs a periodic cleaning. Like at home, stuff gets shoved under tables, into closets or in back rooms. You need to periodically start at the back and work forward. Bring out that forgotten treasure, those mismatched gadgets, the incomplete thinger and the whatchamacallit with no instructions. Pile them all in one area. Now go one section at a time and clean your store. Do not do this all in one day. Map it out and do a section at a time. All the homeless or orphan or white elephant merchandise goes in one place until you can sort it later. When the windows are clean, shelves dusted, drawers organized and spiders evicted, take all that odd lot merchandise plus your outdated seasonal doodads and hold a Spring Cleaning Sale. Here is how to pull it off.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Fliers
• Sale tags
• Cleaning supplies

1. Let all your customers know that you are having a Spring Cleaning Sale. Make fliers at least two weeks in advance and put them out in your store announcing the sale date(s), whether it will last for a day or a week. Decorate the fliers with clip art or sketches of mops, dusters and other cleaning tools. The week before the sale, put an ad in every customer's bag as a reminder.

2. 
   Green Clean

   Have your fresh, clean and current merchandise beautifully displayed. Then take all your cleaned-out gotta-go merchandise and put it in a different area. Use your back room or any odd space out of the main traffic floor. Take those toe-stubbers and weird items to the Spring Cleaning Sale area. Price everything cheap to move fast.

3. 
   Orange Scrub

   During your Spring Cleaning sale, dress you and your staff in jeans and shirts or other casual clothing. Put out dusters, brooms and other tidy cleaning supplies around your sale area. The more it looks like a garage sale, the better. Add lawn spinner flowers or butterflies for quick décor.

4. 
   Pinky Dusty

   Do not spend much time cleaning your sale stuff. Give it a quick dust and price it low. Of course these items should be sold no refund. If you hold these sales regularly, you should have a special "No Refund" stamp printed and stamp all sales slips for this merchandise.

5. All the Spring Cleaning odd lot items should be cash and carry. You do not lay-away and do not hold these items. You need them gone now to the first person to pay and carry them off. If a bulky but useless item goes for a tenth of its value, you are money ahead. Some items eat their heads off in storage taking up space you need for better merchandise.

6. This is a great time to move out UFOs, those Unidentifiable Found Objects. Every store has them. Make a guessing table so that customers can tell you what they are. And then sell or give them away.

7. Spring Cleaning is therapeutic. You will be richer in spirit, space and pocketbook after this successful event.