Less stock in retail stores this spring?

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

I was in 2 stores where I noticed fewer clothing racks than they used to have. One store was Walmart in the women's department. The other was Fashion Bug. Do the wholesale orders of stores like this run on a short enough schedule, that they would have been able to make fewer wholesale orders to stock the shelves for spring? I mean, could I have seen the result of these stores cutting back in anticipation of slow retail sales?

Also in Walmart, I was looking for some airtight plastic containers for storing dry cooking ingredients. I thought I remembered Walmart having a whole aisle with a ridiculous variety of plastic containers. Now there is about 1/4 of an aisle. Was I mistaken?

I asked at Fashion Bug what was going on and they denied having less stock, even though it was so obvious. Whole racks had been removed from the store. The clerk said they were just now putting new clothing out, but there were no empty racks waiting to be filled. Fashion Bug used to have about six racks of jewelry, now it was four and two of those were 75% clearance items. So it looked to me that they were reducing to just two jewelry racks.

Anyone else noticing less stock in the stores? Maybe it is just the changeover to spring merchandise?

[disneysteve]

I don't get out much so I haven't noticed, but I'm sure it is due to the economy. Around Christmas, there were numerous reports about how the stores were very overstocked because merchandise gets ordered well in advance. They placed their orders before things went so far downhill. Then they were stuck with all that stuff and had to do huge markdowns to move the merchandise. I'm sure that in response to that, they cut back on what they ordered for the spring.