It's a Hard Knock Life

One of the biggest moments in retail is when an order of merchandise arrives at the store.  That moment is so full of promise, unless, as you know, we have to "break up" eventually and put the merchandise on sale.
This past week we had at least 60 or 70 boxes of merchandise arrive at the store.  That was a mountain of a project.
We had everyday candy, we had Halloween candy (from 2 distributors), we had Halloween gift items, Kelly Rae Roberts new merchandise, Halloween, everyday and Christmas Embellish Your Story and Lindsey Phillips shoes.
After getting over the quantity of arrivals, you might just want to know "What's the big deal?"
Among other things, retailers like Sweet Tooth are more than just purveyors of merchandise.
We also qualify to be Quality Control Managers.
When merchandise comes into the vendor, their staff simply logs it in and then their warehouse fulfills orders for stores like ours.  Generally speaking, no one at the vendor ever opens a box to inspect the new merchandise.
So when it arrives at Sweet Tooth, we become the people who guarantee that the merchandise is in good condition, its quality is excellent and there are no defects or damages.  We don't just slap a price on the items and put them out for sale.  We inspect each piece for any problems.  We want our merchandise to stand up to the quality which we would purchase ourselves if we were shopping in another store.
Sometimes the headache of following up with vendors who send us defective or damaged merchandise is really a pain the in the neck.  I won't even go into what amount of patience that takes to get everything straightened out.
On the other hand, being the Quality Control Manager for a candy shipment is not such a bad job..  We take our job seriously.  After all, if we don't like the candy we can't really stand behind it and sell it to customers.  So we need to taste a bit of every candy to be able to answer that age old question:  "Is this candy any good?"  Or our other favorite inquiry, "Is this candy fresh?".
There's always the customer who says, "I couldn't work in this store....I would (1) gain so much weight  (2) My whole pay check would go to buying everything in sight or (3)  How do you all stand being around all this candy?"
Now you know:  it's a Hard Knock Life having to assess the quality of gift items, jewelry and especially candy.  But we can't think of a place which is sweeter and a whole lot of fun!