Most of our customers took advantage of our hide away your lay a way! Either they didn't have room to store the toys...or they had nosy children.
Either way it was a lot of work for us...but it paid the bills. Our customers would gather in a pile all the toys they wanted to buy. I would squat on the floor with our Gordon Toys tablet and write every single item. Sometimes I stayed in that position for half an hour...and I was really able to get right up.
When I think about that posture today...it's hard to believe.
Anyway, Allen would drag their toys down to our basement and store them till Christmas eve...which I learned was Xmas noon. Sometimes a customer would call and ask us to remove an item because it was advertised at a discount store cheaper. Big stores like Kmart would use toys as a lost leader..and would sell it cheaper than we were able to buy it from our distributor.
Every year we did this at no extra charge to our customer...and what really bothered me then..and still does...about 12 people would not pick up their toys.
I don't know if they forgot...bought them someplace else...moved away...had a broken marriage...but we didn't want the children to have broken hearts. I would try phoning them but often the phone was disconnected. Then I would get on our phone and call everyone on our list who needed a special item that was hard to get...and they would fly down and thank us profusely! One Christmas at midnight our phone rang and the voice said she forgot to pick up her toys...so my husband got out of bed and greeted her at our store. Where else would you find service like this???
One woman came in with her son and let him collect a big pile of everything he wanted. She told me she'd be in the next day with a down payment. We never saw her again. We didn't mind putting all the toys back...but what we did mind...her child's broken heart. We carried everything...and our motto was WE THINK SMALL!
Frequently our phone would ring and the voice on the other end would start the conversation with...I've looked everywhere..and I can't find it....do you have a certain item. This hurts ... I would answer that it just walked out the door with a customer. I would her her sigh..and then she'd ask how much it went for. Well, I learned that if you have a hard-to-get toy that you can't get, you can be very reasonable...so I would give her an unbelievable figure... I was always able to hear the gasp on the other end. See I have a mean side too.
We also catered Christmas parties for different organizions American Legion, V.F.W. Lion's Club, churches and steel mills and PTA fun fairs.
I made up thousands of grab bags for those and put in magnets, rings, erasers, rulers, jacks, key chains, pens...and about 300 more different items.
Every year we would go to a toy show in a different state and the sales rep would tell us how much each manufacturer planned to spend on advertising a particular item..so we would stock up heavily on his guidelines.
At Christmas Time we found THEY LIED!
Anyway as time went by, toys became more expensive and sophisticated! I never did learn to master Rubik's Cute. We had Simon Sez on display at our checkout....and all day I would see the lights and hear the beeps and that was our first electronic toy!
I dream about our store very often....and I guess the Disney melody is true....A DREAM IS A WISH YOUR HEART MAKES!
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