A sale for the warehouse

The Dubai summer sale runs in the month with the fewest people in the city to buy anything, and that is deliberate.

Walk a mall in late July and read what is on the rail. Spring stock. The linen that arrived in March, the colours a buyer chose last autumn, the sizes left over after the people who wanted them had bought. Seventy per cent off is a confession: the cost of this stock was spent a long time ago and is not coming back at full margin, or at anything close to it.

That money is sunk. The buying decision was made last year, the container landed, and the rent on the shelf has been paid every day since. The only question left is whether the shelf can be emptied before the autumn ranges arrive, and the autumn ranges arrive at the end of the summer whether the shelf is empty or not.

So the sale is a warehouse event with customers invited. The city being half away is fine, because the job was never to bring the city in. The job is to turn a rail of sunk stock into some cash and some space, at whatever price does it, before the next container.

The trouble starts one floor up, where the same sale gets a campaign name, a media plan, a creative round and a target. Then, when the season is over, a deck reports the revenue the sale produced next to the media spent on it and calls the ratio a result. It acquired nobody. The people who bought were the people already in the mall, buying at a price the stock could not refuse.

Judged as marketing, the summer sale fails every year, and that is fine. Judged as what it is, it is a sensible piece of stock management. The only real risk is somebody in the building reporting the second as if it were the first.