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LIMITED QUANTITY ON SOME NOVELTY ITEMS · TRF RESERVES THE RIGHT TO LIMIT QUANTITIES ON SALE PRICED ITEMS · PRICES GOOD UNTIL JANUARY 15TH, 2009
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NTRODUCTION BY CHARLES
"Friends and Family Around the Christmas Tree More Precious Than
Gold..."
Here we are, coming up to the holiday season in the worst economic
year of my lifetime. Yet, The Roadster Factory has had a very satisfactory
year of business. We are a little company with a staff of only twenty-one,
and we work harder to keep up with orders at busy times, and there is plenty
to do even when business is slow. We have had good times and hard times
over the past thirty years, but somehow, we always manage to survive and
grow a little in some way even in the worst of times.
TRF generally prints and mails about twenty-five-thousand Christmas
catalogues, and that was our plan this year. Many people in the company
have worked very hard for two weeks to plan, write, design, and price this
catalogue for our customers. As I have worked many late nights to complete
this catalogue in time for it to go to the printers tomorrow, I have absorbed
many bits of information. As I drive back and forth from home to Roadster
to The Coventry Inn, etc., I listen to National Public Radio which has news
coverage second to none. The business climate seems terrible, and yesterday
two major companies filed for bankruptcy. I wonder if they would have
been better off to stay small and work hard like TRF, and I wonder if the
coming year will be a hard one for my business too. Up till now, TRF has
not suffered any slowdown of business, but I feel that I must make wise
decisions for my employees, for my customer investors, and for my own
family's sake.
Until today, we had only rough estimates of the cost of printing and
mailing our Christmas catalogue, but last night, after spending two weeks of
very hard work in writing it, I began to wonder if it made sense to print it
this year. So far this year, we have printed very little, and we have had some
of the best months of business ever. Our web site works very well for me,
and when I began to wonder how to proceed, I realized that the catalogue is
likely to be nearly as successful or even more successful as a web catalogue
than it would be as a printed catalogue. We printed one sale catalogue this
summer, and it was very successful, but most orders came in from the same
catalogue as it was posted on the web site.
We received firm quotes today for printing the catalogue, and we
estimated the cost of mailing. The total expenditure to print and mail
twenty-five-thousand catalogues would be just under $50,000.00. As John
Swauger stated, you can buy a house around here for that kind of money.
We had a brainstorming session, mostly on the telephone, as I had been up
all night working on the catalogue, and it was noon before I communicated
with my staff from home. As it turned out, both John and Deb Gawlas had
been asking themselves the same questions. During the discussions, we
hatched a new plan. We looked at sales from other years, and we realized
that only a fraction of the customers who receive the catalogue actually
place orders, and many of the orders received are placed on-line from the
web site. After a good deal of thought and discussion, we decided to print
only five-thousand Christmas catalogues this year. We will have these in
hand just before Thanksgiving, and we will place them in every order
shipped between then and Christmas. Of course, the catalogue will be
available to everyone on the web site, and we will notify all customers of
that fact by mailing a post card.
The plan described in the previous paragraph, including printing the
catalogues and printing and mailing the post cards will cost about
$12,000.00. We will save about $38,000.00 by changing our plan, and
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