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Username2324 on 05 December 2010
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leatherhat said:
Username2324 said:
leatherhat said:
Zucas said:

Well first to settle a point, individual store managers DO NOT determine how much product their store gets.  If people would think about this logically they would understand why this makes no sense.  Managers don't require any form of higher education to obtain their job, so why would you put these people in charge of sales analysis of individual stores to gain trends to determine demand for the future.  Please think for a moment.  I'm not entirely sure, with the case of Gamestop for me, whether or not it comes from a district or a regional level, but in no way, shape, or form does the individual store have any control over the amount of product (aside from selling product).  

Now, to get back to the original post, starting somewhere in the summer, we did start to see an increase in PS3 stock at my Gamestop I work at.  Think in July.  Only a couple of months before this had our stock become normal, as most early part of 2010 we didn't have PS3s at all.  But from July till about October, we did obtain more and more PS3s than usual, despite not selling too many of them (don't sell many systems at all in the summer months anyways).  So for the most part up until Black Friday, we had a large quantity of PS3s in stock with not a lot of demand.  Now come Black Friday, we did sell a lot of them, but Wii and 360 were put into a sell out while PS3 just returned to normalcy.  

What do I think of it?  I don't think much of it at all.  We tend to get more stock in right before the holiday season, although it doesn't usually happen until early October instead of late July.  I think what caused this one for PS3 was the change from the 120 GB SKU to the 160 GB SKU.  Not entirely sure if that is the answer, but I think that would explain the abnormal increase for the late summer months.  Then obviously I would think the rest of the increases were just normal for holiday preparation.  Did it seem a little bit more than usual or more than the other competitors?  Yea maybe a little bit but I wouldn't have enough evidence to really say it is Sony channel stuffing.  I mean obviously all of the big 3 have done this at least one time or another so it is to be expected, but I don't know off of this that we could say whether or not they are doing it.  

Hope this helps, Infamous, in possibly figuring out the dilemma.  If ya have anymore questions on things happening in my store, I'm glad to answer them.


Then how exactly do they know what amounts to give each store? There has to  be some sort of accounting on the stores side so that the business would know how much to send. They could use educated guesses based on trends but surely on a store to store basis there would be anomalies that they wouldn't be able to predict. And surely if a store was so well stocked they wouldn't continue to receive shipments.

Incorrect. Like I posted above, stores have on-hand minimums and maximums for inventory. And shipments are based on those numbers. Once you are at or below your minimum on-hand count you get more on your next load. The exceptions are when you have a special promotion coming up, and you might get more than normal. And some times they do "purging" of products where a new product or an updated product will be coming so they empty the warehouses of a current product.

Which brings me to a point I forgot to mention. Stores do not get shipments direct from manufacturers. Pretty much all retail chains have warehouses, and from those warehouses shipments are made on an individual store basis. This again disproves the idea that Sony is "channel stuffing". It's just ludicrous to think that Gamestop would be forced by Sony to accept more than they want.


So this stores minimum on hand count could be 80 ? That sounds way too high even for christmas. Somebody is screwing up in the supply chain, badly. 

Not the minimum, the maximum on hand count could be 80. I should have clarified that generally shipments are triggered once you hit the minimum but that is not true for all products. The minimum on hand could be 5 and the max could 80 and if there is a steady flow of the product (because we all know the product is moving) there is going to be a steady flow of incoming shipments.