The Great Prune Fiasco

It's about time the public learned the truth about the Great Prune Fiasco of 1994 -- especially since we've been talking about loss-leaders in this space recently. Those of you who have heard the story before may still want to stay with us for this one; it definitely bears repeating...

In the fall of 1994, the company then known as Sav-on Drugs issued one of its weekly sales flyers in the mail in Los Angeles County, containing several loss-leaders intended to bring people into the stores. None of these were terribly exciting, because the company did not really want to effectively give away a huge amount of merchandise for free. A typical offering on this sales flyer was the 1-pound box of prunes offered for the price normally charged for a 10 ounce box -- a substantial savings and, in fact, a sale price of just 1 cent ($0.01) more than cost for the item, but not something likely to bring people flocking into the stores. I mean, who really eats prunes in bulk in the first place?

Well, as it happens, there is a demographic group that buys (and eats) all of the prunes they can afford: elderly people, particularly those of Eastern European ancestry. Just like the majority of the people who lived in the area surrounding the Sav-on store at 3rd and Fairfax in Los Angeles, across from the Farmer's Market. Where I was working as the Assistant Manager at the time the ad ran...

We had expected a huge run on prunes (sorry), and our Operations Manager had put in a maximum buy -- three full cargo pallets of prunes, of probably 500 - 600 units each, or the better part of a ton of dried plums. What we hadn't counted on was that the advertising people at Corporate had forgotten to put the "limit 4" text into the circular ad. Or, perhaps, had just figured that no one was going to want to purchase more than 4 pounds of prunes at a time, anyway...

The ads were in effect from Sunday through Saturday of each week, and sure enough, bright and early Sunday morning the store was full of old folks, buying all of the prunes they could carry and getting very belligerent when anyone suggested they leave some for the other customers. There was no limit in the ad, by golly, and the other customers could go roll their hoops; these folks were looking out for #1 and taking everything they could grab. By lunchtime, four hours after the sale went into effect, we were cleaned out (as were a number of our customers, I expect). We put in a frantic order for another load of prunes, but our next supply run wasn't until Thursday, and by now there were hoards of elderly people storming around the store, demanding their prunes, and when offered a raincheck, demanding that we write the raincheck for 24 boxes or 36 boxes (or in one case, 144 boxes) of prunes. By the end of Monday we ran out of rainchecks, too...

I got on the phone and called all of the other stores in the district to see if my counterparts had any extra prunes. The minimum order for this special was half a pallet load (about 10 cases), and I didn't think that many stores would have the demand we were having. Sure enough, none of the other Assistant Managers had been able to move more than a few boxes. I said I'd take all of the prunes off their hands, and as one, they were all quite grateful for the offer. On the Inter-Store Transfer truck on Tuesday, which normally brought us a pallet or two of mixed goods, I was quite pleased to find the equivalent of 7 full cargo pallets of prunes -- nearly 2 tons. There were also another 1,000 or so raincheck forms...

Needless to say, perhaps, we sold all 4,200 boxes of prunes before the end of the day on Tuesday, and I ran out of raincheck forms again on Thursday. Another ton of prunes arrived on the Thursday truck (4 cargo pallets), and they were gone in less than three hours. By the end of Saturday we had sold all 14 pallet-loads of prunes (about 300 cases, if I remember correctly, or on the order of 7,200 pounds), and written rainchecks for at least another 50; I honestly believe that if the company had sent me a tractor-trailer filled with prunes (20 or 30 tons worth, depending on the truck) I could have sold them all that week. And the torrent of rainchecks ensured that no prunes would stay on the shelf for more than a day for months to come...

All in all, it's one of the worst cases of a loss-leader item gone wrong I had ever seen. And it remained that way for nearly a month, until the Great Metamucil Fiasco...

But that's a story for another day!