Elusive Empty Boxes

Once your carefully selected gift items are beautifully displayed in your store what do you have? Empty boxes. No problem, lets just put those away neatly in the back. Now when an item sells we can offer to get the box for the customer. What great service! So we step away from the register and head back to get the box. Not to be seen for 5-10 minutes. Where is that box. It's got to be here somewhere.

When Elaine and I first came to our store one of the details that eluded our attempts to find an effective solution was handling the empty boxes for items. What we found out was that for the 30+ years it had always been a problem but that there was really no way to fix it. Over the years lots of ideas had been attempted to no avail. The current practice was to organize them by vendor. That works out well until you find out you have 70-100 empty boxes from some vendors on hand at any given time. Next we tried to organize it by the department. It seems logical, this item was in the baptism section so the box would be in baptism box section too. Except we have hundreds of items in the baptism section each with their own empty box.

When a search took a long time sometimes a second person would go "help look". Then, if needed a third. Almost always the box was found, but rarely was it found effortlessly. I recall one particular day where I figured out that accounting for staff time it cost almost $10.00 to find a box. Not a good plan for making a business healthy. One option many stores employ is to simply buy new gift boxes, perhaps embossed with the store's logo. If that fits your marketing strategy and budget constraints you have a great solution. But we wanted to use the box we had already paid for from the manufacturer.