Retailers Move to Liquidate Stock With Early Sales

Piles of jewelry, clothing and electric drills are bypassing store shelves and heading straight to liquidators by the caseload as stores try to save as much cash as they can.

Major department stores and mall-based chains have cut prices up to 70 percent to move out mounds of excess inventory stuck in the pipeline since the financial crisis hit in September and people snapped their wallets shut.

Big moves of merchandise happen every year — but usually after Christmas. This year stores are desperate to shed inventory even before Thanksgiving.

Richard D. Hastings, a consumer strategist with Global Hunter Securities, says the latest culprit — fear of deflation — is also causing stores to dump inventory. Clothing and other merchandise is worth less now than it was even three months ago.

"Prices are slipping too fast, and so by the time you sell the product, stores are not covering their operating expenses," he said.

But stores are only making matters worse. The more they discount and send to liquidators, the lower the prices become. Consequently, stores generate less in sales.

Still, in the current economy, they have no choice. Carrying inventory is a big expense, and stores need to preserve cash at a time of tightening credit.

At warehouses operated by Liquidity Services Inc., a leading online auction company for surplus goods, there are rows and rows of pallets of offloaded merchandise ranging from jewelry to consumer electronics.

At the company's Liquidation.com, which auctions surplus goods offered by stores and manufacturers to dollar stores and small businesses that sell on eBay, the number of auctions scheduled for the Thanksgiving weekend has soared to 2,100 — eight times more than last Thanksgiving, said chief executive Bill Angrick.