Make Cash King Again
Fight the Beast by bringing back in-person retail.
More potentially money-making Rule 2 ideas. Some of these can be quite local, and are the sort of businesses that banks will finance.
Once upon a time, in a more civilized age, fictional rich guys walked around with wads of thousand dollar bills. Thurston Howell III had suitcases of them, for his three hour tour. Today, we don’t even have thousand dollar bills; the $100 bill is the largest denomination, and if you walk around with too many of those, the police are likely to presume you guilty of something, and seize your cash.
This is after a great deal of inflation. $1000 then was the same as at least $10,000 today.
And now with the perpetual COVID crisis, even change is disappearing1. Credit cards have become the norm for even minor transactions. Your every shopping move is being recorded on a computer somewhere. Should the powers that be want a complete profile on your habits, the data is now available. For those of you who think this is not a big deal, that only the guilty should worry, do note that being conservative is borderline criminal in the eyes of the Deep State these days. So is being truly Christian. So is reading this book. Our economy is going into Beast Mode.
Maybe we should resist. Maybe we should insist on paying with cash whenever possible. Rights not exercised are rights which disappear. Yes, this is a bother. Credit cards are mighty quick these days. And there are security issues for walking around with big denominations. (But that’s what Concealed Carry is for…) On the up side, using cash makes frivolous spending more visible, as Dave Ramsey is wont to point out.
But we run into a problem: What about online purchases? Every online transaction goes into a database. Yes, you can sort of simulate cash with crypto currency, but for physical products there needs to be a physical address. Every purchase is recorded with name and address.
Amazon.com has frightening amounts of data on me. Its computers know what books I read, what movies I watch, what furnace filters I need, how much I filter my water, and more. For now, they are using this information to sell me more stuff, and a darned good job they are doing. The service is fast, the selection is colossal, and the recommendations are useful. It’s all very seductive, but what happens if some SJW attaches my name to this book and has a hissy fit? Do I get Parlored next?
I need to start practicing what I preach, but it is bloody difficult: I live in a small town and have obscure tastes. If it isn’t at Food Lion, Dollar General, or the local hardware store, it’s road trip time. And for many items I’d like to buy we’re looking at serious road trips. I know of no physical store that has filters which fit my furnace, for example, or hanging closet dehumidifiers which don’t stink2. And even the big city Barnes and Noble is morphing into half toy store. Books for the educated reactionary are hard to find without going online.
Indeed, in person retail in general has gone into steep decline. Malls are closing. Checkout clerks are being replaced by evil robots. Not in Time Inventory Control means that a trip to the store could be a waste of time. Aggressive discounting means shelves loaded with useless crap, or shelves limited to high turnover merchandise – which means I need to go online for a polyester free shirt or shoes that fit my Neanderthal feet.
And as in person retail declines, people grow ever more dependent on online purchases. It’s a vicious cycle…
Can it be reversed? I know not, but I have ideas that some of you might want to try.
Bring Back the Back Room
Once upon a time, if you couldn’t find it on the shelf, you could ask a clerk and he or she would check the “back room.” Many obscure items could be found in such rooms.
During my college days there was even a retail chain – Best Products – which put nearly everything in the back room. The showroom was for samples. You browsed the samples and the catalogs found at kiosks and filled out an order form; you handed your completed order to a clerk; and in a few minutes your order would roll into the checkout area for you to purchase. Shoplifting problem solved! I loved that store.
But slow moving inventory became a bigger issue than shoplifting, and so Best Products gave up on the model and then closed down. And even shoe stores dropped the back room model in favor of self service showrooms.
The new trend was self service everything and aggressive inventory management. If an item doesn’t turn over rapidly, don’t stock it. Let those who have weird tastes or weird shoe sizes ask for the store to order it. The arrangement boosted ROIs and lowered prices. But it also sent customers to the Internet by the millions. And now the malls are dying, and in person shopping is dominated by grocery and discount stores. If it isn’t perishable or too cheap to ship, it’s hard to compete with online.
One way for an in person store to compete with online is to have the desired item now! This means carrying more inventory, which is a challenge.
Get Your Seasons Straight
Do you want to annoy your customers and ruin the retail experience? Try breaking out the Christmas decorations -- in October. And nothing gets people in the holiday mood like playing Christmas tunes in early November -- in the grocery store. What a great way to make people sick of Christmas shopping before they start. Events stretched out too long cease to be events. Christmas season shouldn't begin until after Thanksgiving. Use that back room for the decorations.
(OK, waiting until Thanksgiving evening to deploy the decoration is impractical and mean to the employees, but you don't need to turn on the twinkle lights and you definitely don't need to play Christmas music until Black Friday.)
The early winter themed music is especially annoying in the South, where the leaves are just starting to turn in early November. And this leads me to another pet peeve: in the hotter parts of the country spring and fall are the prime outdoor times. I get most of my suntan in April and October. Meanwhile, the stores are acting as if it's winter; if a lawn chair breaks, too bad.
Where I live winter doesn't really get rolling until mid January. But good luck finding winter clothing when it's actually winter. The clothing stores aggressively reduce inventory before January for tax purposes, and when they restock, it's with spring and summer merchandise. Time to shop online. It's always winter at L.L. Bean...
Don’t Sell Crap
Okay, even with a back room for the obscure stuff, you cannot compete with the Internet for raw selection. You need to pare down the inventory to something manageable. Here’s a wacky idea: curate what you sell. Don’t sell:
Plastic items which emit noxious fumes
Toys which provide minutes of fun and then break
Badminton rackets which unravel if you swing them hard
Compasses which don't point north
Plastic horseshoes with no heft
Outdoor furniture which rusts
Binoculars with serious chromatic aberration
Shoes with memory foam
T shirts which feel like hair shirts
Anything with polyester touching the skin
Cleaners which smell worse than the dirt they remove
Flying disks which don't fly
Plungers which don't fit modern oval toilet bowls
Batter whipped "bread"
Anything with partially hydrogenated oils
Particle board and paper furniture
Headphones which crush the ears
Clock radios which emit blue light
Pan scrubbers which unravel immediately...
These are just some of the items I have encountered in poorly curated retail stores. (Amazon sells crap too, but they have immense warehouses and a user review system that makes it possible to avoid most of it.)
OK, I guess this little rant makes me sound like some kind of fru fru latte sipping yuppie who shops at Whole Foods or something. I plead partially guilty. I would shop at Whole Foods now and then if the nearest store wasn't 90 minutes away. But before I turn in my Man Card allow me to point out two things:
Many of those fragrances and other chemicals I prefer to avoid are estrogenic. (See Rule 4!)
Gun culture types have been known to appreciate quality as well.
Note that there is a difference between appreciating quality vs. wallowing in luxury. It's a mere willingness to pay a bit more for items which perform their stated purpose vs. items which pretends to. A more expensive item which lasts can be cheaper in the long run that a cheaper item which falls apart.
But there are problems with selling quality:
When items last, there are fewer trips to the store.
Inventory is more expensive to have on hand.
Item cost becomes large compared to shipping cost.
People become more aggressive shoppers when costs go up. This means going online.
Bringing in Traffic
OK, so you have what people need when they need it. How do you get people off the Internet and into your store to see what you have? You need some compelling reasons to get them into your store!