Clearance! Close-Out! : Tech Industry Tries White-Sale Concept

The auto industry has model year close-outs and linen retailers have white sales. Now the computer industry is trying its hand at large-scale inventory reduction.K

Workers at a leased 120,000-square-foot building in Santa Ana were getting ready Tuesday for the start of the Microcomputer Inventory Exchange this weekend. The nine-day event will attempt to unload some $20 million of unsold inventory from 600 ComputerLand franchises nationwide. Items for sale include computers, printers, disk drives, software, parts, accessories and other products representing virtually every microcomputer manufacturer.

“It’s an experiment that’s never been tried before,” said organizer Fred Brown, a self-described “product transition consultant” whose Brown Book of Technology tracks market prices on microcomputers and peripherals.

“The problem is that a mechanism for dealing with excess inventory distribution was never created for the computer industry,” Brown said. “It’s catching up with everyone else.”

Brown said the volume of material coming in from the ComputerLand stores was surprisingly heavy. Since they began setting up for the sale about three weeks ago, workers have handled about 160,000 “master cartons” of computer-related goods, some of them containing 25 to 50 items. In the past, liquidations of high-tech inventories usually have been handled on a much smaller scale of perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 pieces, he said.