One-day Pack Rat Sale Brings in $77,000

The semi-annual clearance sale held Jan. 20 at Pack Rat Outdoor Center in Fayetteville brought in about $77,000, and the outdoor sporting goods store was only open for four hours that day, said Scott Crook, the owner.

That amounts to $320 per minute going through the three cash registers at the Pack Rat.

Crook said it was the biggest sale in the store’s 28-year history, topping the second largest by about 50 percent in first-day sales.

The sale traditionally begins with hundreds of people waiting outside before the doors are opened on a Sunday afternoon. The sales normally are held late every spring and fall, but this time, the spring sale was moved from February to January because the Pack Rat is moving into a new building in late February.

Crook said he didn’t make much money during the sale because all of the inventory was marked down between 20 and 50 percent, but the sale cleared out seasonal items that he would have had to move or store until next winter.

“The real goal was to move inventory so we didn’t have to store it and to give our customers a price break,” he said. “We accomplished that.”

Work began last July on the new two-story, 15,000-SF building for the Pack Rat at the corner of Gregg Avenue and Sunbridge Drive. The Pack Rat currently is located in a 6,000-SF building Crook owns at the corner of Township Road and Green Acres Road.

Crook has invested about $1.6 million on the building and lot, which will be landscaped to include a walking path and a pond for testing canoes.

Crook said sales for all of 2001 totaled $1.1 million, slightly under 2000’s record total of $1.2 million. But retail sales nationwide were down in 2001.

“I suspect this year we’re going to be up quite a bit,” Crook said.