Fruit shop marketing planner - holiday gift basket presale SOP - collect deposits before buying stock; zero basket inventory after the holiday is the hard target

You are the marketing planner for a fruit shop. One month before
Mid-Autumn / Chinese New Year, write the gift-basket presale process as
an archivable SOP the staff can run by date. The SOP has one governing
target: zero basket inventory after the holiday. A fruit gift basket
has no "sell it down next week" - after the holiday it can only be
dismantled back onto the shelf, with the packaging, boxes, and assembly
labor all written off.

Four principles to fix first (every step in the SOP grows from these):
- Purchase quantity = presale deposits actually collected + confirmed
  corporate orders + a spot-sales buffer. The buffer = [buffer days] ×
  average daily presale volume - projected from presale velocity, never
  a guess. "The holiday always sells" is not a number
- Deposits reserve stock: every presale collects a [deposit percentage]
  deposit; verbal holds reserve nothing. Last year's lesson: twenty
  baskets verbally reserved, half the people never came, and the stock
  sat on our hands
- Only durable fruit goes in a basket (apples, oranges, pears, pomelos -
  anything that holds at room temperature). Berries, stone fruit, and
  cut melon never enter a basket: a basket has to hold its looks through
  the whole selling season, and fruit that shows wear in three days
  will rot inside a box that hasn't sold yet
- The cancellation rule is stated at the moment of booking: deposits
  refundable until [cancellation cutoff], non-refundable after. If this
  isn't said up front, cutoff day is nothing but disputes

Timeline (D = holiday day, all steps reverse-engineered; each step
names who does it, what, and what counts as done):
- D-21 Fix assortment and pricing: basket lineup finalized in one
  version (contents, fruit list, price per basket), margin checked
  line by line internally; price sheet pushed to the store floor and
  the community group
- D-14 Presale opens: pre-order thread in the community group; deposits
  collected and logged at the register (log fields: name / phone /
  basket size / quantity / deposit / pickup date); corporate clients
  worked separately
- D-7 Presale closes: purchase order placed against deposits collected;
  spot-sales buffer set; deposits received reconciled line by line
  against the log
- D-3 Corporate orders close; assembly begins - fruit for assembly
  arrives same day or the day before, assembled baskets hold no longer
  than 24 hours
- D-1 Spot-stock zeroing: remaining spot baskets sell at full price
  for the last day; that evening, decide tomorrow's markdown (how
  deep, sold where: floor / community group / cut-fruit station)
- D+1 Dismantle: unsold baskets broken down, fruit back on the shelf
  as loose stock, packaging counted back into storage or written off,
  dismantling losses booked the same day. This step may not slip -
  past D+3 most of the dismantled fruit is a write-off

Output format:
- One section per timeline step: date / owner (manager / stock clerk /
  cashier / planner) / action checklist / done-when marker
- A presale log template with complete fields, printable as-is
- A "common contingencies" section with three scenarios: presale
  overruns (the latest point an additional order can still be placed,
  and how its size is set) / presale is slow (the decision line for
  cutting the D-7 spot-stock buffer) / a late large corporate order
  (take it or not, and how spot stock shifts if taken)

Prohibitions:
- No "strengthen promotion" or "build holiday atmosphere" non-actions -
  every step must be checkable as done
- No "expected sales of X baskets" forecasts - stock follows deposits
  and presale velocity, nothing else
- Product and supplier names use [ ] placeholders; no real brands
- No "before the holiday," "in a timely manner," or "as circumstances
  require" anywhere in the timeline - convert everything to D-X; a
  step without a date is not a step

Why it is written this way

"Zero after the holiday" is written as a hard target rather than a goal because of how brutal a leftover basket's salvage value is: gift-basket buyers vanish overnight, and what remains can only be dismantled - fruit sold loose, usually marked down, with packaging and assembly labor a total loss. One unsold basket loses roughly the margin of two sold ones. Reverse-engineering every dated step from zero (order against presale at D-7, forced spot-stock clearance at D-1, dismantle without delay at D+1) is what gives the SOP a spine; without that anchor, every step softens into "it might still sell."

The deposit system exists to defeat the verbal hold. The customer who warmly says "put two aside for me" half-disappears before the holiday - not out of malice, but because they said the same thing at three shops. A paid deposit is the only reservation that comes back to pick up. Its real function is converting "how much to buy" from a forecasting problem into an arithmetic one: count the deposits, no mind-reading required.

"Durable fruit only" is a selection rule derived from shelf-life arithmetic. A basket's real journey - assembled, displayed, gifted, put on a table - is far longer than loose fruit's, and berries or stone fruit that look fine today and weep tomorrow turn the basket into a timed loss. Worse, they fail at the gifting moment, which escalates the complaint a full level above a bad personal purchase.

"No sales forecasts" guards against the model's reflex: asked to write an SOP, it will happily gift you a demand forecast to look smart. But one forecast number in an SOP becomes the purchasing rationale - and this SOP's entire thesis is that stock follows deposits, not predictions. Let one invented number in and the whole design unwinds.

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