Don't think its ever happened before, but I'll have to disagree with Richelle on this one lol, sorry Richelle :)
It's not that I think a sell through stat isn't valid, it's a very important stat, but for me, a stat like that asks more questions than gives answers. I tend to think that a sell through rate can be seriously over rated and can at times be misleading on the surface, see my above post for those reasons.
It's all relative, I am involved in a business venture where by we import cars. Now let's say that the sweet spot in our market is the 8K - 12K price range, that's where most of the ducks are feeding. At this price point we can move vehicles at a decent pace and make around 1k margin on a deal.
Now that doesn't stop us from trying to sell a 75K car, at which we would have a much larger margin, somewhere around the 10K mark. While the sell through rate of the 75K car is not even going to be close to a 10K car, purely because there aren't as many ducks with their bills in the pond, we still only have to sell one, as opposed to selling 10 of the others to balance the equation.
Slower sell through rate, same profit!
Basic principle of business, you can sell 1000 things at a margin of 1 dollar each to make $1,000 or you can sell one thing at a $1,000 margin to make the same amount. Chances are that your sell through rate will be lower on the thousand dollar margin, but so long as you can sell it in the time frame you have sold the other thousand items, you're still there.
Again, a stat doesn't always tell the whole story. You have to dig down, you have to understand why the stat is as it is. Once you understand it, you can then seek opportunities within it. Never any guarantee that there are opportunities within it of course, but if you take a stat at face value without digging down on it, then you can guarantee there will be zero opportunities.......
:)