At the Fantastic General Store, we have inventory every year. Yes, just like other stores, we have to pay taxes too. The benevolent prince needs his tax revenue as much as the evil overlord. There is also the fact that inventory is a good opportunity to make sure we have the correct counts for each item. Nobody wants twelve dozen of Tom Thumbs pies when we only sell ten. But if you have done inventory before, you know the more prep you put into getting ready, the better. You want to reduce down the amount of stock you have as much as you can, while still being able to function as a store. No one wants to spend hours counting hundreds of elf shoes, or dozens of medicinal (ahem poisoned) apples that just came in. You also want items in sealed up boxes with a scannable sticker, because that’s quicker than scanning each individual item. You want everything to be easy to scan, because no one wants to climb over mountains of stuff. You also want as little stuff to count on the sales floor as possible, because you can’t very well seal items in a box, and expect customers to still buy them. Basically, the goal of inventory prep is to get the store to the point where you spend as little time as possible counting, but the store still has enough product to meet customers’ needs for a few weeks.