Stupid Catalog Tricks

During the last few years I’ve seen the following:

• A gift cataloger sitting on almost 10 percent of his Christmas orders, unfulfilled (and unfulfillable) on Dec. 15. Reason: Nobody watched the back-order report.

• A mid-sized cataloger who couldn’t fulfill most of the new items in a major mailing. Reason: The cataloger started stocking too late, then couldn’t recover when problems arose.