Yup, that's me wearing the hat of the "receiving department" which happens quite often around here.
We love to see pallets of toys arrive in Historic Downtown Durango because we know that all the time and effort we've put into looking at pictures, asking opinions, and scratching our heads has come to fruition. It's exciting too because people never really know what we're up to! We like that part.

Lets debunk one of our mysteries! How do the toys get here? I get that question alot from my smaller friends (including the kindergarten class that was here yesterday). Sometimes it is really easy, sometimes it takes time for us to do our research and evaluate the products in the store. Our store is fairly well organized into departments, then we break down the departments into categories. From that we find ourselves looking at a "snapshot" rather than the big picture. It's less intimidating that way.

Toy information comes to us in all forms. We receive catalogs in the mail, we have companies that call us, we look at toys on the internet that people have suggested, and we use our imagination! After we pick the category to work on we also have to figure who we get the toys from (the vendor) and what all the vendor has to offer. Sometimes these companies offer special deals. We try to take advantage of as many deals as we can so we can try to keep our prices down.

It may be that all we need to order are toys that have been adopted that we always try to have in the store (core products) and that is pretty easy using our computer and a little common sense. Beyond that we may shop in the catalog for new toys or for toys to fill a particular gap. We can also ask our toy representatives (these people work very hard at knowing what their companies have to offer and have years of experience) for advice.

After we've done our homework, we submit our order to the company and wait. And wait. And wait. It seems like it takes a very long time for the toys to arrive when one is excited about new toys.  Then our pals from FEDEX and UPS show up with lots of boxes from the company. We unpack them one by one, make sure we got what we ordered, and put them on the shelves so they can be adopted. Our front door is not wide enough to fit a whole pallet through and neither is our back door, that's why you see pallets of toys on the sidewalk waiting to be adopted and loved after a long journey by truck!

This is sort of like going to the grocery store for groceries.... cart included.