Stunned children all over the world were today taking in the
implications of action by Santa's Elves. Rumours that in a cost cutting
exercise, the Elves had been focusing too heavily on inventory levels
have been circulating for some time. However, todays announcement that
the Elves were decommitting from Christmas Eve delivery has still come
as a shock. A spokes-Elf said today
"We are frankly surprised to see such a year end skew again. Our job is
to reduce the cost of inventory, and the fact that children cannot
schedule their requests throughout the year is hardly our fault. All
that we asked of the children was that they correctly forecast 3 months
out their requirements and tried to avoid peak delivery dates such as
midnight on December 24th. With the new 'Toy Engineering And
Manufacturing Systems - 2' in place, we can actually make toys in 5
working days, the trouble is the kids place an order in October, change
their mind over what colour they want and they lose their place in the
queue."
Other supply problems have been apparent recently. A move to flush the
backlog of all 'Soft' orders, resulted in tragedy, when an over zealous
Elf removed all orders for cuddly dolls, teddy bears and fluffy rabbits,
giving priority to Action-men, Biker-Mice and other 'Hard' requests.
No Supply of 2-Eyed Bears
A final twist came when the Elves admitted they had run out of supply of
2-eyed bears. "We have no idea how this happened", said another
spokes-elf, "All year long the 2-eyed bears have been the most popular
type of bear, and somehow this trend has continued into the Christmas
period. Quite how we were supposed to cater for this is beyond me. We
have a huge supply of 1-eye and 4-eye bears and will be substituting
these wherever possible. We had originally planned to ship bears with
no eyes, and then post the eyes during first quarter, but the feed back
we got on this was not encouraging.
Advice for 2011 - Santa Speaks out
In his first official comment on the problems, Santa released the
following statement to the the Children of the world: "After all your
hard work and being good in 2010, it looks as though you are not going
to get the Christmas you deserve. Your job was to be good, and you have
done that, all we can now do is carry on being good and hope we can get
as many toys shipped as possible. It would be very helpful if you could
try not to give all the other helper-Santas a hard time, and don't snow
them under with request for delivery dates and story's of how important
it is to get your particular train set delivered on time etc."
Finally, to avoid the same problem in 2011, the following advice has
been given:
- Always get your order on early, at least 3 months notice, written,
properly specified with a signed contract from your parents and a
full delivery address including a full Chimney Survey.
- Don't Change your mind. Even wavering on colour will lose you any
chance of delivery. Just adding a set of batteries to an order
might seem like a simple request to you, but with our systems
nothing could be further from the truth.
- Try and avoid popular toys which we might run out of supply. This
year it was 2-eye teddies, last year it was 2-eye teddies, who knows
what it will be next year?
- Try and avoid unpopular toys which we have already said we don't
want any supply of, since this saves holding any stock.
- Try and avoid toys which we have announced earlier in they year but
have not yet actually started to ship. Just because a toy is
advertised for Christmas, and you have asked for delivery 3 months
ago, doesn't count for a figgy pudding. Stick to the stuff you had
last year.
- And finally, PLEASE, will someone let us know why we always seem to
have a huge skew at year-end???? It happens every year and we are
still none the wiser.
