I guess the numerous complaints of empty shelves by customers and the media have caught up with with Sears HQ so now they're flooding stores with random merchandise most of which isn't needed. This is particularly a problem over in softlines (which I'm running while the softlines lead is on vacation). I'm almost wondering if it's just filler just to make the shelves appear full.
What usually happens with these hodge-podge freight shipments is that it will sit and sit, taking up precious salesfloor space until it's time to clearance it out. Even still, weeks will go by until Sears just takes the merchandise back, most of it still remaining unsold after about a year.
Or, in today's case, we get popular or somewhat popular items (Lee women's jeans, in this example) but it comes in a quantity much higher than necessary. If I recall, there were 120 pieces of Lee jeans when 40 would have been sufficient for our purposes and would have prevented the need to take up extra floor space in Women's RTW, which is at a premium as it is.
There isn't any rhyme or reason to Sears' logistics. If Sears had fast food restaurants, they'd order three years' supply of hamburger buns when only a two-week supply was necessary, not really knowing that after week three or four it would go stale.
Most retail companies operate on a JIT (just-in-time) model where merchandise is replenished as it is sold. If a shipment of 200 fuzzy slippers arrived October of last year and 70% of it still remained in April the following year, it doesn't make any sense to send more. I don't know what Sears' merchandising strategy is.
It grinds my gears that Sears is more concerned about replenishing things like three large boxes of fuzzy slippers (in April, no less) when my HA employees are losing sales because something a customer comes in wanting to buy isn't in stock--items that are our bread and butter.