Trader Buck’s, for us here at the Logansport location, has been the gift that just keeps on giving. Maybe other have had different experiences. This post describes what our experience with having a booth with them has been.
After discovering that we had lost more in theft than we had made in sales and that in one day after bringing in new t-shirts, we had already had one stolen from the front of the booth which is in direct view of the cameras, we decided to cut our losses and leave. We have never heard back from the person we emailed asking for assistance in ways to curb the theft. In person when Bill spoke with a manager the only thing she could do was tell him that she was going to have a talk with her people at the checkout counter. She gave him the exit paperwork and told him we would be billed for the current month and the next month. We knew that, we had signed a contract stating that we needed to give 30 days notice. The response was still less than spectacular although I’m not exactly sure what the manager could do. Especially when she indicated that the cameras didn’t help. If I ever see anyone in town wearing that t-shirt I will know for sure who the thief was and it will make me sad.
The same day we signed the exit contract we came back with the truck and removed all of our merchandise from the booth. There was no point in leaving anything there we were no longer making sales we were just marked for theft. We came in with boxes and left with boxes, shelf units, and hangers and nobody stopped us. That could be because the manager had alerted them that we were vendors. However, I had been in there before carrying boxes and left with boxes and nobody had ever stopped me. For all they knew I could have been robbing the place blind. It’s not that they knew me because it had been my first time in the store, Bill had been the only one they potentially could have known. It’s not that they didn’t see me because I made eye contact with some of the employees behind the desk as I was leaving. I was waiting for them to stop me and ask for ID or to see what was in the boxes or some response that would show they were at least attempting to stop would be theft. What could they do better? I don’t know. I think it’s all new to them and it’s been chaotic because the crowds have been large almost everyday. They don’t have hours that vendors can come in to restock or clean, you have to do it during business hours. Maybe if there were times when vendors could be there without customers that might help. Then if you saw a person walking out with boxes of stuff and not paying you could assume that was not a vendor. But I have no idea what I’m talking about.
On April 1st our on-line account was updated to say that they were sending us a check for our sales. It is now May 1st and we have never received that check.
We had a sale of an item that we had never had in our booth posted to our account AFTER we had cleaned EVERYTHING out of the booth. (This is the second time this has happened. We immediately email them to let them know of the error and we never hear back from them. They also never remove the sale from our account.)
We received notice that they were crediting our account for $100, which is great. It still means we owe money but not as much money. We don’t have any explanation of why they are applying a credit.
They said that they had called to notify us, of something, on some date, for reasons that are still a mystery to us. We received no phone calls from them on our home phone or Bill’s cell phone, no messages left, no letters, no emails, no notes on our account.
All of this could be because you have a new location, new staff, new managers, new vendors and they are working out the kinks. The person we signed our contract with and initially emailed about incorrect sales and the thefts is not new but this is not his only location. We still have one month to go even though we have nothing there. Our hope was that once all of our inventory was gone that it would just be paying for a month and nothing else. It seems like the fun of being part of their team just doesn’t stop. I feel sorry for the people whose sales have been incorrectly give to us. I wonder now if some of the “theft” was that our merchandise was incorrectly added to another vendor’s account. While I understand that when something is new it will take time to figure it all out and get everybody trained up to snuff and I get that. In the meantime it’s also not really acceptable to have your vendors not only paying to be there but also not having sales correctly attributed or having such overwhelming theft going on unchecked.
The overall impression of Trader Buck’s is if you need this to make money that you depend on to live you might want to do a lot more checking on what vendors are saying before you jump in. If you are doing this for fun and you don’t mind high losses then this could be a very good choice. Again I think that finding a way to check with vendors to see what their experiences have been will be HUGE. In this case we could not check with vendors at this location because it is a new location. Everything was an unknown but I wish I would have found another location close to us so I could find existing vendors to see what their experiences have been. I wish I would have done more research on the internet to find reviews from vendors. Are we sorry we did this? Yes and No. Yes, because it’s just been so chaotic. Had management been more responsive to the emails, to our reaching out about ideas to curb theft, to following through I think we would have stayed and kept trying. As it is the lack of receiving the check they said they sent a month ago, the charge for a month and then a credit but not for the full cost of a month with no explanation, and the call that never came just don’t seem like good business practices. No, because it showed us that we could pull a store together in 1 week. We had to design a space, buy everything needed, create an inventory, and set it all up. Then weekly add new items. It was fun to have a reason to create and to get sales. In a weird way even having things stolen was a statement that we were creating items that people wanted. They liked them enough to risk arrest.
In summary the Buck is a lame duck for us.
