Originally Posted by PatriceJ
i know all that. it's beside my point.
i repeat ... selling something that's only been gathering dust for more than a year at cost or below will generate more income than stubbornly letting it continue to gather dust.
You're definitely correct about inventory turn being important. And as a shop owner, I fully agree with you on that. However, selling at a loss is always difficult, even though sometimes we have to do it just to recapture some of the money that's tied up in inventory.
I've noticed that a lot of B&M stores tend to keep a lot of old inventory just to fill up space on the store shelves, as well as to offer a wider range of shades and color choices. And lots of fabrics really never go out of style.
What is really frustrating is when quilt magazines come out with new patterns for fabrics that have been out for a long time and then you can't find (or in the case of the shop owner) are out of some of the fabrics required, and they're no longer stocked by the distributor/manufacturer. It would really be nice sometimes if there was more coordination between the fabric introduction and the projects that use them.