When I talk to my dealers, sometimes I feel like a broken record.

It’s certainly true that I have a number of speeches prepared and in the can for situations where the topic is applicable. One of them is that inventory is a necessary evil: You need to sell inventory to make money, but the risk is that some or all of it goes unsold.

In fact, when I’m feeling clever, I refer to it as Schrödinger’s Inventory: It’s both an asset and a liability, and which it is depends on when you’re looking at it.

I feel my dealer clients’ pain, because I’ve been there myself. I have funny stories about dead stock for days, but they’re only funny in retrospect. Mostly, at the time, they were a disaster.

Well, that’s not true. I have one funny story about dead stock that was also funny at the time.

Let me set the stage: The retailer I was working for had a serious inventory problem. Our dead stock problem was out of control.

Rather than deal with it a little at a time, previous management regimes kicked the can down the road, making it someone else’s problem at a later date.

Well, the later date was here.

At both the macro (national) level and the micro (store) level, our dead stock on hand was dire.

As additional color for the story, we had two designations in our system for discontinued inventory.

The first, which we called “disco” — short for discontinued — was noted in our system with a capital D. Disco stock was anything at or near EOL (end of life) and might be up to 12 months old.

Anything older than that was much worse. It was designated as X in the system, and we called it “X-stock” when talking about it. While X-stock might only be 13 months old, it was often much older.

I’m deadly serious: When I took over my store, I found Sony NP-1 NiCad camcorder batteries from the late 1980s in my stockroom. That’s how long our company’s dead stock had been allowed to fester. Not only was some of it unsellable, but it was a literal environmental hazard.

Disco stock wasn’t often that hard to sell. There’s always a buyer looking for a good deal on last year’s TV or camcorder.

X-stock? Well, there was the occasional gold nugget buried in the compost pile, but most of it was, frankly, worth less than actual compost.

The problem that had held us back — and allowed our dead stock to become unmanageable — was that no one in charge had ever done what I counsel my dealer clients to do: take regular, prudent write-downs and write-offs of aging inventory to be able to clear it out at discount prices.

Speaking frankly, when your salespeople are on straight commission and get paid on gross profit, and your store managers are bonused on their store’s gross profit, there’s zero incentive to sell products to customers at below the listed costs.

To make a long story short (and to get to my point), we had a regime change in senior management.

The new senior management, to their credit, took a long, hard look at our dead stock and made a hard call — but the right call: They took a massive write-down of aging inventory.

The truly egregious, unsellable junk was written off completely. That allowed me to load up a truck with electronic garbage — like my beloved Sony NP-1 battery packs — and take them to the city’s eco station for safe disposal.

Other aging inventory went from being overpriced junk to junk that was a steal of a deal!

I personally helped myself to a Sony ES 5-disc CD changer when its price was reduced to $100 from nearly $1,000!

At the same time as we experienced a regime change in senior management, we also hired a new district manager.

I’ll call him Fred. He wasn’t just new to us — he was new to retail electronics.

Believe it or not, he was recruited from McDonald’s.

I bring this up for two reasons. The first is that Fred knew nothing about the retail electronics business, so his tenure with us was frustrating and hilarious at times.

The main reason I bring it up is that our former fry cook/new district manager didn’t have much (if any) AV equipment in his house. He scored some sweet deals on our X-stock, including a floor model 55-inch CRT rear-projection TV (remember those?) and a high-end 5.1-channel home theater AVR from one of our other locations.

Well, Fred was on store visits with our new Western Canada zone manager — his boss. We’ll call him Barney.

Knowing they were coming, my assistant Stan and I worked with our team to ensure our store was spotless.

It was. But more importantly, we conspired together.

I said to Stan, “What absolute garbage do we have that we should con Fred into buying?”

We both knew the answer. We had a floor model set of 5.1 satellite speakers and a subwoofer from Polk Audio. They were perfectly decent speakers, but they had sat on the floor for too long.

This speaker set had been here forever — longer than any of us. By right, owing to its seniority, that Polk Audio speaker package should have been store manager by now — maybe even district manager.

It was decided that when Fred and Barney visited, Stan and I would try to persuade Fred to buy these clearance speakers.

Store visit day arrived, and Fred and Barney rolled up. Fred was talking up front with Stan and me while his boss, Barney, browsed around.

From the back of the store, Barney yelled, “Fred! Come here!”

Fred, Stan and I made our way back to where Barney was standing — right in front of the clearance Polk Audio speaker package.

Barney pointed at Fred. “You need these.”

Fred tried to speak.

“No,” said Barney. “You need these. You need these right now!”

So I rang it up for Fred (was $2,499, now $500), and Stan boxed them up and carried them out to his car.

When they left, we high-fived each other.

It may not have been the biggest sale ever, but it was one of my favorite sales.