Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your
contribution is not tax-deductible.)
PayPal Acct: 
Feedback: 
Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):
| [ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, [6] ] |
| Subject: Part A- The Battle Is On The Frontlines | |
|
Author: Dennis S. Vogel |
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
Date Posted: 23:40:03 08/21/05 Sun In reply to: J 's message, "Beaten & bruised" on 14:21:19 08/20/05 Sat Hi, This ended up being a multipart response too. You can copy & paste this into a text editor & highlight, change the font size & color, depending what will make it easier for you to read. You should consider my advice here together with posts for Anonymous. What you need is to beat W-M on the frontlines -- consumers’ minds. Plus, keep this in mind, despite the hype spread by W-M executes & managers many W-M employees don’t like W-M. They may give in to pressure from supervisors & peer pressure, when they do the W-M cheer, but they’re only cheering externally. Exposure to more truth, as opposed to W-M propaganda, may weaken W-M’s hold in the area. So, you can beat W-M in the employees’ minds too. Some blame Wal-Mart for the U.S. losing jobs. Sam’s Choice products aren’t Sam’s American Choice anymore. I suppose they hope we won’t notice. W-M used to brag about all of the American jobs they were saving & creating by buying American-made products. Why aren’t they bragging now about jobs they save & create. Could it be because those jobs are in other countries? What happened to the American jobs they saved & created? We could debate who’s at fault for the loss of jobs. If you want to join in blaming W-M, show people they’re supporting the kind of thing they dread by shopping at W-M. How many Chinese workers, who make W-M merchandise are supporting American workers who aren’t making W-M merchandise? You can find a lot negatives about W-M & similar businesses by using search engines. But be careful about using complaints from possibly unreliable sources. The FTC & other agencies have negatives about big businesses in their web sites. You can use their search features. Just type or copy & paste the names of businesses you want information about. Then in a little while you’ll find what the agency has, if anything, about the business you’re investigating. Here are some links to use- http://www.consumer.gov/ http://www.ftc.gov/ Unions tend to want to drag W-M down, if there aren’t local unions, maybe you can find others who want to form a group. <CENTER>Differentiation</CENTER> This next suggestion is something you could use if you find information from an unbiased sourced. If business owners find pertinent information about what they sell, like www.ams.usda.gov/howtobuy/ they can make sure what they offer fits the recommendations. They can promote the fact they comply with the information. Even if they don’t have permission to reprint it, they can let people know where to find it. In marketing messages, they can ask the rhetorical question- “Are These Guidelines Used Where You Buy Your____?” <CENTER>The 3 R’s</CENTER> An environmental message is “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” The unspoken part of this message is don’t fill the landfills. When people buy disposable clothes (poor quality clothes that wear out quickly or tear easily & aren’t worth mending), they’re not helping the planet. <CENTER>What Are Their Priorities?</CENTER> I understand why people hesitate before buying things when they don’t know if they’ll have enough money in the near future for living expenses. Getting good value is important any time. This next example can be adapted to show this. Zig Ziglar told the story of somebody selling a smoke alarm. The prospect told his tale of woe & why he couldn’t afford to buy anything. The sales rep used that as a reason to buy the alarm. He said, “A fire for anybody is a tragedy, but it - would - wipe - you - out!” (Zig also emphasizes the importance of our voices effectively. The rep highlighted this point by saying the last part in a slow staccato.) <CENTER>Helping Customers Change Their Priorities</CENTER> Do you offer mending & altering service? Do you charge for it? Some clothing sellers offer free or reduced seamstress service on clothes they sell. A store I worked in had an employee’s wife who did the work when it was needed. She wasn’t an employee. But paying her to do it supported an employee’s family. If you, or your employee, do the mending & altering, you could do it when you'd just be waiting for people to come to the store. It'd be productive time because it's customer service. You could listen to educational tapes/CDs while you do this to help you find business solutions. Then the time would be used even more productively. Many people are working on losing weight but the fact is many U.S. citizens are overweight. (I don’t know which country you’re in.) What this means is -- people are apt to need their clothes altered to have a comfortable fit. Being uncomfortable at work isn’t good for morale or productivity. When you & your employee are both working (if you can afford it), you could start offering delivery of replacement clothes to workplaces within X miles of your store. If there’s not a used clothing or consignment shop nearby, you could take show how much faith you have in clothes you sell. State, “There’s a lot of value in the (brand names) clothes. So, when your clothes don’t fit or if your job changes, I’ll accept the items as trade-ins & apply the value as part of the price of new clothes. This value will be based on what I think I can resell it for. So, bring your (items) to (business name). In an uncertain world, you can be sure when you have good quality.” Then you’d have some used clothes to sell. It doesn’t mean you have to grant a lot trade-in. Example- W-M pants $10. Your pants $20. For simplicity, this is assuming there'll be no inflation. I'm using easy dollar figures, but I don't know how close they are to your reality. Pants retail price $20 wholesale $10 trade-in value $5. If the customer was able & willing to pay full-retail, you'd lose $5. If a customer would've bought a pair of pants from a competitor, but bought from you because of this offer, you’d gain $5 you wouldn't have had. You don’t have to make this permanent until you test it. You can do this as a promotion. If it works well, announce it as a store policy. If you occasionally have sale prices to boost sales, you don’t have price credibility. People will wait for the lower prices then buy. By having the trade-in instead of sale prices, your prices will still be credible. Customers get the lower prices by investing in value, then using that value (trade-in) to pay less later. From the customer's viewpoint- In a rummage sale, they may get about $2 for their pants. They pay $20 for pants, then get save $5 next time with a trade-in when they buy another pair & pay $15. They also get mending & altering service. So, it’s not just an issue of whether to replace worn-out clothes. Though that’s bad enough. Getting rid of ill-fitting or torn clothes is a waste. Throwing away worn-out clothes is a waste of money too. I don’t know what the prices are, but let’s use these hypothetically. W-M pants $10. Your pants $20. If W-M pants last a year, then in 2 years, they’ll pay $20 or more for pants anyway. But the same kind of pants at W-M the next year might cost $12. Plus, they’ll be using up some of their time (their time = their lives) to go shopping again. They won’t get much, if any, help from W-M employees, so it may take longer to get those 2 pairs than one from you. The clothing suppliers should have product information & comparisons of quality. You should ask for it or check their web sites. You should figure out what you can offer to get more sales without decreasing your profit too much. Then you can determine how to promote the value you offer. When you come back here, you can get my suggestions about helping customers keep their jobs. Dennis S. Vogel thrivingbusiness@email.com If using better methods increased your daily profit by 10%, how much higher would your annual profit be? If you get as little as $100 per day, 5 days a week for 52 weeks, you’d get $2600 more than you get now. There are many ways to increase it 10 times higher or more. http://web1.lakefield.net/~thrivingbusiness/ http://www.voy.com/31049/ [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| Subject | Author | Date |
| Part B- Customers In Better Circumstances Mean Better Business | Dennis S. Vogel | 00:02:50 08/30/05 Tue |
|
Forum timezone: GMT-6 VF Version: 3.00b, ConfDB: Before posting please read our privacy policy. VoyForums(tm) is a Free Service from Voyager Info-Systems. Copyright © 1998-2019 Voyager Info-Systems. All Rights Reserved. |