Summertime - and the Livin' is….Busy?? Wednesday, August 12, 2009
So you know that the staff here at Stanton’s is very busy throughout the year (especially in the fall and during OMEA contest season), but what goes on at your primary sheet music resource during the summer?
Of course, phone call and order frequency slow down and there are the requisite staff vacations scheduled, but the store remains very active from May through August. It all begins with doing inventory – counting the 1,000′s of titles Stanton’s has in-stock is quite a big and lengthy job even after selling a lot of music during the school year.  This gives us a chance to clean up and reorganize specific areas and to find any ‘mis-filed’ items and get them back to where they belong.
Completing inventory allows us to place large stock orders for next year with the myriad publishers that we deal with. Although this is not a big deal with some of the smaller publishers, when it comes to the biggies (i.e. Hal Leonard, Alfred, etc.) these orders usually encompass a couple of skids piled with 100+ boxes filled with music! Of course, the resulting job is to get all of that music checked in, sorted and filed in its proper place.
Other summer tasks include listening to ALL of the new choral, band, and orchestra titles from the publishers (more on this in a later post) to choose what will be in our yearly school and church promotions, as well as what we want to recommend to our customers. Once the promotional titles have been selected, we create our own write-ups (words like ‘Stunning’ and ‘Impressive’ from the publisher promotions don’t exactly tell you if your kids can play a piece or not) and do our own layout work before sending the promotion out to be produced and mailed. We also add all of these titles and their audio files to the Stanton’s Listening Library as well as the ‘Top Choices’ section of our main website.
These tasks along with handling in-house customers, purchase orders, and intermittent phone calls ensure that Stanton’s remains quite busy through the summer months!