Several of our clients use some version of a "Newly Received" category. Ideally, there would be a way in the category settings to automatically remove each product after a specified X number of days.
Example - New shipment of shopping bags is received. We add this bag to the Newly Received category today, along with it's other normal categories. After 30 days in the category, the product is automatically removed from the Newly Received category and remains in all other categories.