Time to Move Beyond Christmas--Setting Up the Markdown Tables.

Today we reset the store for post-Christmas sales. We have two tables of marked down cards, ornaments, and holiday-themed gift items, plus a stray assortment of leftover gift items--a bird house, a gymnastic monkey, some Peruvian bird whistles. If I was planning to reorder, I'd keep the items for the new shipment, but in most of these cases, it is not to be.

We had several enthusiastic customers who bought up a decent amount of what we had left over, such that we needed to do further consolidation by the end of the day. Shown is what seems to be our least popular holiday card, as even with markdown, we've only been able to sell one. It seemed cute to me at the time, but apparently I was so dizzied by its presence that I couldn't hold my phone still enough to make a clear picture.

The table shifting meant that we needed to build new displays. A self-improvement table went up, as did a Valentine's table. The general football table became more Packer-specific, and we kept one table each for adult and kids' Christmas titles, which we'll keep for a couple more weeks.

As we consolidate the calendars, the height rises from displays. And there was some cleaning up too--we stopped buying a card line that needed a special display, and after making sure that the vendor couldn't use it for another store, we had to toss it, as we couldn't figure out how it could be repurposed.