EVERYTHING (Yes, Even the Mannequins) MUST GO : If business had been this good beforehand, Buffums wouldn’t have needed a liquidation sale.
On her lunch hour, Linda Melgar trotted through Buffums’ second-floor ladies wear department and plopped a white sweater with a crocheted front on the counter.
“I wish this was $40,” she said. With the storewide 20% discount, the sweater came to $40.90.
“I wish it was $30,” she said, taking out her wallet for the fourth time in six days to buy a Buffums going-out-of-business-sale item.
It’s been just over a week since the doomed department store chain launched a liquidation sale to get rid of everything from the new spring wardrobe stock to the paintings on the walls in the credit department, and business at Buffums has never been better.
In fact, if business had been this good before, Buffums wouldn’t have had to have a going-out-of-business sale.
Sales figures were so high on some days the computers couldn’t handle them. In the first six hours of the clearance, Buffums stores sold more merchandise than they had on any other day in the chain’s 87-year history--2 1/2 times as much as was sold the Saturday before Christmas, the biggest shopping day of the year, said Dixie Towers, senior vice president and general merchandise manager.
“Ready-to-wear has been strong. Children’s has been phenomenal. Accessories has been fabulous, especially handbags,” Towers said. “The crowd has been well behaved, delightfully so. Our customers have expressed their condolences. It’s like attending your own wake.”
Three floors below Towers’ sedate corporate downtown office, shoppers were pawing through everything from men’s underwear to Waterford crystal. Most of them were grumbling that the discount is still only 20%.
“If it were half price, I’d buy it. But 20% is still not enough,” Wanda Mathis, in a pink sweater and pink pants, said as she pulled a pink coat-dress from the spring rack. “These are bad times for everybody. I live on a fixed income. If I can get it for less, I will.”
Prices will certainly go down, probably in increments of 10% all the way to 70%. Whatever remains will be donated to charity, Towers said.
But Buffums isn’t saying when it will further reduce prices. Even the sales clerks claim not to know, leaving serious shoppers to decide whether to buy now or wait for a markdown and risk that the item will be sold.
Rumors abound. One woman said she heard that prices would drop today. Towers said the event will be announced in large newspaper ads. Meanwhile, many patrons are coming to Buffums every other day, watching for the big price slash.
Eileen Mariner, 66, of Australia is spending her two-month vacation in Long Beach. She’s been here for one week and has already been to Buffums four times.
“A lot of my friends say, ‘Wait until almost the last and you get more bargains,’ ” she said, checking out a two-piece navy suit with a sailor collar. “ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but then you get more junk.’ ”
Six days after the sale began March 20, the chain’s 16 department stores had already sold 48% of their merchandise. By the time prices are cut in half, most of the good stuff will be gone, according to Towers, who helped run a liquidation sale when the venerable B. Altman & Co. department stores went belly up in New York City last year. “By the time we got to 70%, the only thing left were out-of-season greeting cards and other things no one wanted,” she said.
Security was shored up to handle the Buffums crowds. Hungry shoppers lined up at the doors of the downtown store when the clearance sale began, looking for perfumes and expensive porcelain collectibles that virtually never go on sale. Since then, the crowds have waned to a brisk but comfortable pace.
Dismembered mannequins sit naked, and for sale, on the second floor. Electric orange signs blaring “Going Out Of Business Sale” seem out of place in the once-stately downtown store, which analysts say catered too much to elderly patrons and old money.
“I know the orange signs are ugly, they’re horrible. But we had more people in this store Wednesday, Thursday and Friday--people of all ages. Our Junior department is gone--sold out. Obviously, we did have some younger patrons.”
Buffums, born in 1904 at the corner of Broadway and Pine Avenue in Long Beach and still headquartered in this town, has been losing money for more than three years, industry analysts said. The Australian company that owns the chain recently rejected a $30-million plan to revamp the stores, many of them dark, cramped and not remodeled since the day they opened. This month, the owners announced the chain would close.
If there’s a good time to go out of business, Buffums picked it. With the Gulf War just over and some economists predicting the recession is ending, the public was in the mood to buy.
“There was a lot of pent-up consumer demand and they were looking for a value,” Towers said.
Shoppers of all ages have brought the sleepy downtown store back to life. Sportswear is teeming with customers, some of them teary-eyed at the impending demise of the place.
“I’ll miss Buffums,” one woman said sadly, before complaining that the china upstairs is still too expensive.
Consumer interest has been piqued, but too late. Store officials predict the sale will last another seven or eight weeks before Buffums’ doors close forever.
