Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 5, 1994 TAG: 9401050031
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG and PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But just try to buy a sled after your mom has sold your cobweb-covered Flexible Flyer in a summer yard sale.
Try to buy a sled when the spirit hits you during the second big snow of the season and you'll come up with . . . nothing.
"No sleds, no shovels, no salt," a spokesman for Hills Department Store in Christiansburg said Tuesday.
In a winter that already has produced more snow than the New River Valley usually sees, stores can't keep their shelves stocked. They even have depleted their warehouses of winter goods.
Stock, they say, is based on last year's sales.
And last year, there was just one snowstorm.
"You just cross your fingers and order," said one business manager. "It's feast or famine. If it snows, they want 'em. If it doesn't, no one's going to go out and buy a shovel."
This week, even the clerks with the least seniority knew how many sleds were in stock: zero.
Diane Blair, owner of Dublin Hardware, said a manufacturing shortage is partially to blame.
"They just didn't make enough," she said.
She has not been able to get wooden sleds at all. Her store sold out of kerosene heaters Monday, and getting enough salt for people who want to melt snow from their driveways also has been a problem. Some folks have resorted to buying bags of fertilizer instead, she said, which does work, although not as well.
At Lowe's of Dublin, sleds and snow shovels have been missing since Christmas week. "We sold out of them the first snow we got," said Steve Mines, warehouse manager.
"Our warehouse is out of them," he said. "We've got some coming. We had to order them direct from the factory."
Manufacturers failed to anticipate the demand for such items as sleds and snow shovels, said Pulaski Wal-Mart Manager Robert DeMartino. He said his store is seeking the items from "another source on the other side of the continent" because its regular suppliers cannot make them available.
"There are so many retailers and so few manufacturers," he said.
"Apparently, almost everyone around here's out of everything," said Rick Hall, assistant manager of Kmart in Christiansburg, where they do have ice scrapers. "We've reordered."
Don't worry about the kids - they are compromising, sharing scuffed saucers and wooden sleds or using cafeteria trays, cardboard boxes, rubber rafts, inner tubes and trash-can lids to slide down icy hills.
"What didn't work were the cardboard boxes," said Blacksburg's Ralph Badinelli, who went sledding with his children Tuesday. "Too sticky."
It is the older folk, with less imagination and more-delicate derrieres, who are impatiently awaiting the real thing.
It is the older folk who are calling 15 department and hardware stores a day, hoping that just one sled is lying forgotten in a stockroom.
New sleds, shovels and salt will arrive sometime "next week?" offered Kmart's Hall.
Other businesses reported similar arrival dates.
This year's snow-and-shovel sales should mean more stock next year.
And if next year's snow amounts to little more than a flurry?
"That could be a problem," Hall said. "I guess we'd just hold on to them until we could sell them."
by CNB