Ok, so I have been working in the Sitecore Content Editor for 5 years now and it shows that you learn something new every day.  I needed a quick and easy way to delete a bunch of sub-items.  For the longest time I would go through and delete each item from the list.  If the deleted item had sub-items then I would delete that whole folder with the sub-items as well.  However, what if I just wanted to delete the items that were sub-items but not the actual item itself?  This is where I started looking through the Ribbon for the answer and found it.  Take a look at the given Colors item list:

All you have to do is click on the parent item, which in this case is the Colors folder item, and then click on the Home tab in the Ribbon, and then click on the Delete drop-down in the Operations chunk.  You will then see the action to “Delete Subitems”, click on the icon and you will get a dialog box that says, “Are you sure you want to delete these 11 items?”  Click OK and voila they are all gone but the parent folder is left behind as seen below.  Easy peezy.  Happy coding!