Rethinking the Box: Before you sign that lease.
Rethinking the Box is a collection of ruminations on retail: a unique combination of sober (and sobering) business analysis mixed with drunken, inflammatory personal invective.
Previously:
Study your History. Recognise your Motives. Know your Customer Base, and your Staff. Find your Niche. Consider your Product Lines, take a second look at What the Customers Want, and then stare again in dismay at the Profit Margins. Try calculating the rent and the revenue from inventory (with a side of coffee) and compare your numbers to average industry per-storefront sales.
(Damn, I may actually be going somewhere with this.)
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Before we all reach numbers burn-out (for some of you that was three columns ago) let’s put the calculator away for a bit and instead consider retail theory.
I’ve some books I’d like to recommend to you:
[yes, I am in fact a bookseller]
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The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg : Da Capo Press (Perseus), Cambridge, MA; 2nd edition 1999, isbn 9781569246818. The publisher’s web site has a link to the Google Books preview.
The basic argument of the book is that each of us needs a place outside of home and work (or home and school) and that the casual pick-up communitites that form in these ‘third places’ are vital for both our own sanity and the health of the community.
Think of the barflies of the TV show Cheers or the crowd hanging around in the movie Barbershop… or of Paris sidewalk cafés, or Irish pubs (or the neighborhood bar ‘round the corner), or even church pancake breakfasts and potluck dinners — as the social aspects of some churches can be just as important as the religious ones.
You might not know any of these people outside the context of the ‘third place’, and honestly that’s the way most of us would prefer it, at least to begin with. One doesn’t need to form a life-long bond with the guy on the next barstool to enjoy a spontaneous conversation with him, or even a weekly game of darts. The lack of commitment is part of the appeal: we have close family and friends with demands on our time and attention, obligations at both home and work which can’t be ignored. If we miss a Tuesday night trivia game down at the pub, or skip Friday’s karaoke, there are no penalties past some gentle ribbing — which is balanced by the opportunity for conversation, “So, where were you last week?”
Certainly, if you hit it off, something like this could be the start of a long and lasting friendship, or even a relationship up to and including marriage — but it is also very easy to drift in and out of many groups like this with little more investment than the cost of a cup of coffee.
Part of what keeps the atmosphere casual is the near-universal presence of a paper-thin excuse to hang out all day: We’re ‘just’ grabbing a beer, or ‘just happened’ to come in for a cup of coffee and end up talking for an hour with a friend, or maybe we’re looking for a book, “that one book… I can’t quite remember, it’s on the tip of my tongue, maybe I’ll see it if I browse a little.”
Eventually, if you like the place, you stop making excuses to yourself and just make the time to drop by. It becomes part of your routine, part of the way you decompress and cope with the stress of work, and the demands of home. (even if you love your family, there are demands: but you might turn to your significant other and say, “Just leave the dishes in the sink, Honey, we can take care of them when we get back.”)
For every bartender, barber, bookseller, and barista there are a dozen patrons with a dozen different reason why they like the place (and those reasons may be different on different days). I think the amazing thing is not that places like this exist, or that people love them, but that bookstores are one of the precious few retailers that command this kind of loyalty and devotion.
Oh sure, I complain about the campers all the time — but while annoying they might also be considered necessary.
Also worth looking into is the author’s follow-up, Celebrating the Third Place [publisher’s page, preview] which has profiles of 15 businesses identified by Oldenburg as ‘great good places’.
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Next up:
Retail Superstars: Inside the 25 Best Independent Stores in America by George Whalin : Portfolio (Penguin), New York, 1st edition 2009, isbn 9781591842606. link to the publisher’s page; also, the author’s website features photographs of The 25, and a blog; the photos of Powell’s posted there make me drool.
‘Retail Expert’ George Whalin is a self-promoting huckster, an enthusiastic cheerleading ‘consultant’ and speaker, and the sort who comes down solidly on the Teacher and Pundit side of the street, as opposed to being someone who rolls up their sleeves and gets dirty putting ideas into practice.
Even so: I didn’t say he was wrong — and per the included author blurb/bio, he spent 25 years in retail (in the office and in the trenches) before he started his (now 20 year old) consulting business.
In Retail Superstars he devotes the bulk of the book to the 25 case studies presented (though each only gets 8-12 pages) and if that’s all it was, it might still be worth buying — the icing on the cake is the scant 10 pages he spends on the introduction, which outlines his thoughts and theories on what makes an independent retailer truly remarkable — theories that are illustrated and reinforced by the examples that follow. It’s not the pictures he paints that makes the book worthwhile, but the frame that he puts them in.
A co-worker of mine saw me browsing the book, before I bought it, and said, “Oh, don’t buy that, you’ll just get a bunch of really good ideas that the corporate office will never let you use here.”
Yes. Exactly.
aside: among the resources cited in Retail Superstars are two books (that I already happened to own) by Seth Godin: Purple Cow (isbn 9781591840213) and The Big Moo (isbn 9781591841036) — these don’t have a whole heck of a lot to do with retail, generally, or at least not at the store level, but can be quite inspiring to the independent retailer or any sort of entrepreneur. Seth is also a self-promoting, cheerleading huckster whose sole business is not the production of tangible things but rather hard-to-nail-down ideas — but damn if those ideas aren’t good, and also excellent seeds for real things if only one can figure out where to plant them and how to tend them. Godin’s books and his blog are recommended.
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Bookselling is unique in retail, it is its own thing and a Whole Nother and customer’s expectations about bookstores are high, unrealistic, completely out of line with other retailers — and non-negotiable.
We do our best.
Sometimes we create a customer for life, so successful in one search (or in a close series of customer queries) that we come off as Book Savants: able to track down obscure titles with the barest of information (perhaps, only the colour of the cover) but when we find that one book, then we garner all kinds of book cred with this customer, and they’ll be willing to weather future mis-steps and foibles and temporary delays because they know we’re trying our best and that we do know what we’re doing, so they give us a little more time (or admit their own shortcomings) and eventually — we will sell them a book; or more often, many books.
Just as often: one mistake, or one bookseller having a bad day (at work, or before she came to work) will turn off a customer and they’ll write us off entirely. “Screw you guys, I’m shopping down the street or online.”
Even if the shop down the street is just as bad. Even if they still can’t find it online because Amazon (or even Google) pulls up nil for “That one Oprah Book with the Red Cover. We’ve been forever tarred because perception is nine-tenths of the law, and one isolated bad 2 minute interaction has poisoned this customer against us; it will take years to repair the relationship.
Even when we can positively identify the books, and know exactly what the customer wants no matter how vague the initial query, if we don’t have the book in stock — we’re just as useless. There is a breaking point between “Man, this store has everything!” and “Man, these guys are worthless.” that lurks somewhere between stocking 70,000 titles and 100,000 titles. I don’t know exactly where that triple point between demand, stock, and bookseller expertise is — but (for a general bookstore) it’s more than 70,000 titles in-store and to hand, on the shelf. (note: it does you no good to stock it if you can’t find it, and we spend quite a few payroll hours just straightening, re-organizing, and reshelving mis-shelved books)
We work for those Book Savant moments; not only does this satisfy the customer, it makes us feel good, too — like we’re smart, and know books, and are good at our job and stuff. An unremitting diet of “Screw you, I’ll go find it on Amazon” can make one a bitter, insular blogger with little recourse outside of snide commentary about the customers on the internets.
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So if we take these three threads — Neighborhood Hangout, Distinctive Independent, Deep Stock with Knowledgeable Staff — and apply them to the other points I’ve made about being more than a comic shop and how bookstore sales fundamentally differ from the Local Comic Shop — and consider that coffee may mean more to your bottom line than books (though we’ll need the books to pay for themselves, at a minimum)
— then maybe we can see that while what I’m proposing is not a New thing, it may be a Good Thing. I’m not re-inventing the wheel here, but I am taking wheels-with-teeth and seeing how the gears can mesh — concept with demand, business with community, accessabilty with expertise — and how that all matches up to stacks and stacks of books behind a comfy chair and next to a decent coffee shop.
Most weeks this would be enough; the paragraph above would serve as a conclusion, I’d write a teaser for next week, and that’d be it.
But let’s roll right into the next topic, which I feel is related to the points above (quite closely related, in fact) and something I’ve been meaning to talk about for some time:
Location.
It’s not enough to have a really good idea. It’s not enough to hire the best staff, and buy scads of inventory, and comfy chairs, and serve a damn fine cuppa with delicious home-made sandwiches and truly spectacular desserts. It’s not enough to be Henry James’s Great Good Place, legendary even among those who know you — you can be the best bookstore in Shangri-freakin’-La but if no one can find you (or if they can’t find a parking space after they find you) then you might as well be completely freakin’ invisible.
One difference between the chains and the independent is that the chains have real estate experts; “For example, have you ever wondered why so many Starbucks stores are located near dry cleaners and video stores? That’s so Starbucks can take advantage of the ‘going-to-work’ traffic generated from people dropping off clothes at the dry cleaners on their way to work.” [source]
It’s not enough to know what you want, and to know what kind of space you’d like to put it in — one also has to consider exactly where the store should be.
Some independents got lucky, or the owner/original founder made instinctive choices that proved to be correct: there’s a Town Square; or a walkable, friendly retail district; or a historic-and/or-touristy part of town — and a retail store front just happened to be available? Score.
Rule of Thumb: If we like shopping there, odds are good we can do well selling there, and you don’t need college-level courses in real estate development to make these decisions.
(And it seems to me like many, many successful independents are doing well because they located in these neighborhoods; the owner’s instincts proved to be correct)
But Old Main Street or The Boardwalk or Riverstreet or Whatever — not only are these districts rare in urban areas, it’s a rare urban area that has an 1890s (or 1910s, or even 1940s) retail & restaurant zone that hasn’t been paved over, or demolished & rebuilt — or if it is still standing, one that is still viable & and with retail space available. —when they are up and running, I’m sure the rent is prohibitively expensive.
Most of us won’t luck into these prime locations, and will instead be shopping for space out in the ‘burbs or in less-than-savory urban areas.
It’s a rare blogger indeed who has studied real estate development (and of all the things I learned while at the Georgia Tech College of Architecture, the year’s-worth of development/business courses have served me much better in life than all the studio/drafting/drawing classes forced upon me) — but since I, improbably, do have a bit of background in the field, let me share it with you.
1. There is no such thing as too much traffic.
There is something quite specific — and yet, so applicable — that I learned from one pissy class assignment 15 years ago: One of the group projects (for the course now designated as BC 4660) was finding a parcel of land currently for sale, and developing a best-use plan. My group found a narrow plot right next to an interstate and proposed a multi-screen movie theatre — the decade-plus since has found that same property purchased, combined with adjecent plots, and built up as apartments, a possibility we discounted as we thought potential residents would be turned off by road noise and pollution; which only shows what mere students know about what people will put up with.
Anyway…
A number of groups in this class found excellent retail locations, and proposed one variety of shop/restaurant or another for the site, but immediately discounted the value of the site (in their verbal presentation or written report) because the surrounding roads were congested with traffic, either during rush hour or all day long.
The professor (an associate professor with his own business on the side, not an academic) was quick to criticize and rebuke all these arguments: he pointed out (and though I hate him, still hate him as he was a royal bastard and a half-assed professor — but I have since come to agree with him on many points) that there is No Such Thing as “too much” traffic.
Even If people aren’t looking for your storefront, and so there is no advantage to being on a popular and well-known road; the fact that you are on a major thoroughfare makes it easier to give directions, people have seen you out of the corner of their eye (or are familiar with your neighbors) and serendipity, a random force that can’t be planned for or made accountable, is more likely to strike if you’re out in the open, as opposed to being on a back road somewhere.
Every group that claimed a site was unsuitable because of ‘too much traffic’ was reduced by a full letter grade. The prof was a bastard, but he was right.
2. Good neighbors make good business
Even on a back-county, out-of-the-way highway through the middle of nowhere, that strip-mall location with the really cheap rent might, in fact, be worth considering:
The other tenants are a Chinese Restaurant, a Dry Cleaner, a Cell Phone marketer, a Bar, and down on the corner, a Gas Station.
This isn’t ideal, but it’ll work: You can afford this rent, there will be a smattering of traffic from the other businesses, and if most (or all) of the other available storefronts are rented out in this strip mall, you can count on a certain amount of ‘sidewalk’ traffic (actually car traffic, but cars that pull into and stop at this retail center) and also fair visibilty from the road.
— It may be years before someone remembers you and comes in to buy something, but you need a clear, easily seen location before they even have that impression.
and This Will Work (might even work well) if you’re opening a more traditional comic shop — which can start out on a much smaller footprint. For a bookstore, we need grander dreams.
3. What you can ‘afford’ in terms of rent might depend a lot on how Big You Dream.
Are you thinking too small? Are you thinking, “we’ll start small and build up”? This is honest, hard work — and should be commended, but don’t pick an out-of-the way storefront just because “it’s all we can afford right now” and “maybe we can move into a bigger space later”
Take a risk. Buy more inventory, risk a bigger space: nothing sells books like more books, and nothing buys loyal customers (customers willing to wait a few days for a future order) like putting at least One book they wanted into their greedy mitts Today.
Imagine a supermarket attempting to ‘make do’ and ‘grow’ their business with anything less than 10,000 square feet — sure, it can be done. You might even make money, but a large chunk of the public will think of you as a mere grocery, or even just a ‘convenience store’ — and when they head out to the Supermarket you’re not the retailer they’re referring to.
Niche marketing on a large scale is a gamble: basically, you’re betting that your Chosen Niche is so irresistable that folks will drive past their usual retailer of whatever good because you do a better job of stocking the niche, and nine time out of ten you have something when others don’t — and if you’re big enough, there are a lot of people willing to drive an hour or three for that same opportunity, or even just to bask in the light of your voluminous stock.
They may not buy anything (…today) but most love the affirmation that someone is stocking a whole store with the things they like — as this re-affirms their odd hobby and makes them feel Special.
— this is natural. And also translates to a certain number of sales… but by itself won’t pay the rent.
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And going back, “maybe we’ll move into a bigger space later.” Sure, maybe you’ll have to, but it means giving up part (even a large part) of your laboriously built base. People are lazy. No matter how easy or obvious you make the change, some will give up on you just because it’s too much ‘bother’. (I’m not sure exactly how these people are put out by a move, but this is a matter of psychology and perception, not reality)
It’s not so much like starting from scratch, but it will still be hard — in fact, if you had to move but had a couple of years lead time: it might be easier to open a new, larger location as a branch, run both simultaneously for a few years, and then close the smaller, older location. That way you’d build up a market for the new store that was independent of the old crowd, and when the closing comes and you take that hit — and it will mean a drop in sales — you’ve a couple years of sales history and new customers at the ‘new’ location to buffer the loss.
This relates to one thing I’ve noticed about the shopping public: people love novelty, but hate change. If it’s New & Improved, they can certainly get behind it, particularly if it seems like they’re the first person (among their group of friends) to discover it — but once patterns become set, once something is ‘theirs’, even an act of Congress, or Parliament—or of God—may not be enough to dislodge them from their chosen course.
(This is good news, in as much as it makes it easier to launch something new — and also it’s good to connect with a sticky, tenacious, established customer base — no matter how fickle.)
The take-away for retailers is that you should be careful, damn careful, about where you choose to open your first storefront — because the more successful you are, the more difficult it will be to move from that home base to somewhere new.
Oh sure, you can expand from there, and the expansions will succeed or fail on their own merits, but folks will always prefer (or wax nostalgic about) the ‘original’ store.
It’s worth taking some time to find the one, best place to start off with. — not that you should feel paralyzed, unable to take that first step (or that next step) for fear you’re doing something wrong — but do take an hour (or a day, or a week) to think about location, before making a long-term commitment.
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There are not just professionals, but whole departments, at major chains that do nothing but real estate.
An independent doesn’t have the same resources, obviously. I’m just trying to point out this blindspot to you before you open up a bookstore, as a public service.
Don’t rely on luck.
Location, Location, Location.
There is a reason it’s a cliché.
