Memories

The Life Cycle of a Retail Idea

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The annual corporate image overhaul was usually followed by a frenzy of inaction, no changes outlined or implemented at all. One year, “corporate” decided that its most valuable property was the company’s image as a solution center, the place customers visited to get answers, like spiritual seekers traveling to commune with a lama on a mountaintop. The decades-old reputation of sales associates possessing a broad and deep knowledge base was the asset that was advertised, but the advertising was backed up with no internal education initiatives or local emphasis on, well, anything.

To be a bit nicer about it, I did get a pretty reliable t-shirt that I still wear sometimes, as seen in the photo above.

The latest news from RadioShack—that it is closing about 20% of its stores, that declining sales resulted in a net loss of $400 million in 2013—resulted in a statement that I overheard more than once last week: “Yeah, RadioShack went out of business. They closed yesterday.” It isn’t going out of business, not yet, and not yesterday, but how often do you hear RadioShack’s name come up in water cooler conversation anymore? And if and when you do, for the last several years, the next part of the sentence usually has been “… is going out of business.”

It is difficult to manage news properly when you have spent the last decade attempting to manage expectations.

Like many people, the first personal computer I ever used was a TRS-80 (Tandy Radio Shack-80), on which I learned the BASIC programming language and which we used in some now forgotten way to produce the very first newspaper I wrote, for my junior high school. (We also used a hand-cranked “ditto” machine.) From 1980 till 2005, I did not set foot in a Radio Shack, or give a thought to its stores or its brand. My association with the company was that it was for hobbyists and that I am not one. I bought my first computer from an Apple retailer, my phone from a department store, batteries from the local convenience store. The first and last time that I soldered something, it was not fun and I was a Cub Scout.

Running parallel to my various professional career employments has been my back-up: retail sales associate. In the 1980s, I partly paid for college by working at a Montgomery Ward (now out of business). Through the 1990s, I worked for an independent family-owned bookseller (now out of business). Starting in 2005, I worked at two RadioShacks in two locations, for two very talented managers. I became very fond of RadioShack and its long retail history, and I left the company in 2010. So yes, the only thing these various stores have in common is my employment with them and … well, at least RadioShack is still in business. As of today.

But for how long? In 1986, the Montgomery Ward in which I worked not only sold a lot of everything, but it also had its own cafeteria, so that shoppers, weary of their morning spent spending and ordering and redecorating, did not even have to leave the premises to eat. They could continue shopping after chowing down on a burger. Department store visits were destination shopping experiences, and customers could brand their entire home as Sears or Wards residences; a century ago, one could even buy a house, design plans and material and tools, from those companies’ catalogs. But one could also dash in and pick something up in an emergency—a roll of film or a pack of batteries or light bulbs or a necktie to replace the one with a fresh coffee stain. (I’m just spit-balling ideas here; that never happened to me.)

The malls replaced the department stores as destinations in themselves, plus they threw in a movie theater. Most of the major department stores have closed, except Sears and Kmart, and Sears is considered troubled by analysts and Kmart is continuously restructuring.

For a while, bookstores grew into destination experiences in the way they combined music sections with huge periodical collections and more than a few books. But by the mid-1990s, online retailers were beginning to attract attention—well, Amazon was—as well as a piece of the retail dollar. Many online retailers retain one’s entire purchase history; Amazon shows that my first purchase with it was made in 1998. At around that time, I first heard a customer reply to the information that a book was not in stock with this sentence: “I’ll drive over to Amazon and get it there.” When my colleagues and I would politely offer the information that no such thing as “an Amazon store” existed, they would correct us in return and say that they had been there the night before.

“Amazon” had come to mean “the big Barnes & Noble in the next town” for our customers, and Barnes & Noble was in trouble because of this association, too. Amazon has never had a physical store, and each retail operation that earns all 100 cents of its sales dollar from sales completed in real stores on real streets with real employees and real customers has been flummoxed for 15 years by this fact. Almost every bookstore tried to establish a dot.com enterprise only to discover—shortly after their customers discovered this first—that fulfillment meant getting the book that had been ordered into the store for the customer to pick up. And if the customers were going to visit the store for the privilege of paying shipping for a book that, if only you had stocked it there would have been no shipping charge, well, customers were going to find an alternative, like paying for shipping to their doorstep and not visiting your store.

The speed with which the book selling sector collapsed—Waldenbooks, Borders, hundreds if not thousands of independent booksellers—has only recently been rivaled. By the electronics sector.

And again, it is a combination of what was revolutionary about Amazon (and Walmart) combined with some baffling decisions and perplexing identity crises by electronics stores. The numbers are staggering, as pointed out in this Atlantic Monthly article:

RadioShack’s long slide coincides [with] the steep ascendance of Amazon as America’s great brick-and-mortar destroyer. In 2003, Amazon and RadioShack each had about $5 billion in sales, as WSJ business editor Dennis Berman pointed out. Last year, Amazon had $75 billion to RadioShack’s $3.5 billion.

Some further comparison is illuminating: At the end of 2013, RadioShack had 5,000 brick-and-mortar stores with 27,500 employees and $3.5 billion in sales, which is $127,000 in sales per employee. Its website is the 1,066th most popular in the world. At the end of 2013, Amazon had zero brick-and-mortar stores with 117,300 employees (full- and part-time) and $75 billion in sales, which is $640,000 in sales per employee.

Once upon a time, a decade ago, RadioShack and Amazon were the same size. But RadioShack has had six logos and changed its name twice since the late 1990s. Its annual Christmas advertising blitz has included gimmicks like casting Shaquille O’Neal as a spokesman, promoting itself as the public’s wireless destination, installing Amazon.com “fulfillment lockers” in stores (so Amazon customers who did not want things shipped to their homes could have them shipped to their local RadioShack (!) just to bring customers into the stores), and, it is worth repeating, decisively changing its name to “The Shack” and then decisively back. More than one writer has pointed out that “RadioShack.com” is an oxymoron and is also the history of technology in one mouthful. This year, during the most-watched Super Bowl in history, viewers saw the company make fun of itself in a way that won the company a lot of affection but probably not one single new customer.

In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal’s online publication, MarketWatch, “On March 4, RadioShack’s ‘consumer perception’ among American adults who made a purchase in the store within the previous 90 days was just 8%, according to an analysis carried out for MarketWatch by YouGov BrandIndex.” In English, of those people who recently spent real money in a real RadioShack, only 8% were aware of RadioShack as an anything. For comparison, Best Buy gets a 22% customer perception rating. So the amusing ad did nothing except declare that, yes, we know you know we think we are out-of-touch, but, um, we won’t be like that anymore. “Come see what’s possible when we do things together,” is the new slogan. Are you asking me or telling me? Um, “things?”

What do all the recent headlines generated by the news of RadioShack’s imminent imminence mean, really? What are we telling ourselves about what we think we are (maybe) going to miss, if 92% of RadioShack’s actual money-spending customers were not even aware they spent that money in a RadioShack? Most of the business analyst articles are not about the changing face of retail in the face of a hundred-year-old company’s demise but head-shaking premature obituaries, neither musings about ways forward for the company nor attempts to explain how RadioShack has managed to stay alive after so many previous obits.

RadioShack is the company whose image for more than a decade has been “the store that thinks you need to be reminded of its image.” Sometimes the R is sans serif and sometimes it is serif, sometimes we are “The Shack” and sometimes … when a company does not know why it is in business, just that it wants to remain in business, it closes, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

It will always de-materialize if you don’t work for it.

‘Two of One Kind’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich


This is the story that moved me the most today. Clara Gantt of Los Angeles, 94 years old, accepted the remains of her husband on Friday at Los Angeles International Airport, a short time after learning that he had in fact died in 1951 as a prisoner of war in North Korea. That country has slowly, so slowly, begun to release information about and even the mortal remains of battlefield dead and dead POWs to its sworn enemy, the United States.

Mrs. Gantt’s final contact from her husband was a Christmastime letter sent from the front at the end of 1950. Shortly after, historians now know, he was taken prisoner on the battlefield and died in Korean custody. They had only been married for two years, or 65, depending on whether one asks Mrs. Gantt.

Her dedication to the memory of her late husband was such that she refused to consider him her late husband until this year, when she learned that the government had received remains from North Korea and positively identified them as Sgt. Joseph Gantt. She told reporters that even when she was able to purchase a house for herself in the 1960s, she also hired a gardener to tend it, since she knew he did not like yard work and she wanted him feel free to do whatever he liked when he returned home from the war.

From the Los Angeles Times story: “During the last 63 years, no one else caught Clara Gantt’s fancy as she waited for news of her husband. She told the base officials assigned to check wives’ homes for other men to come by anytime, (as) they’d never catch her with anyone.

“‘I am very, very proud of him. He was a wonderful husband, an understanding man,’ she told reporters at the airport. ‘I always did love my husband, we was two of one kind, we loved each other. And that made our marriage complete.'”

Widow, 94, Receives Remains of Fallen Husband

I learned about that kind of enduring love from my grandparents. Eighteen years ago this month, William Aldrich died, aged 91. Bill and Edith (Pearson) Aldrich were married for 64 years. I asked my grandmother if she could recall how they met. “How did we meet? I don’t think I remember,” she said and looked at her sister-in-law, my great-aunt June, and repeated my question.”What did we do?” she asked. June brightened, “We danced.”

“I guess we danced,” my grandmother nodded and looked at me. The two of them held hands and repeated, “We danced.”

Edith Aldrich had a gift that the widow in Los Angeles did not receive: She saw her husband every day for 64 years. But both love stories are priceless.

As they grew old and then older, my grandparent’s life became that “complete” marriage. In their small Vermont hill town, the mail was delivered twice a day to the country store. My grandfather would march down the hill, cross highway 100 and the bridge over the West River, collect the mail and return. Her eyes would follow him every step.

By age 85, he was living with Alzheimer’s and her watchful care included hiding the car keys and having my uncle (and once, me) conceal the lawnmower behind the barn, lest he act on his foggy desire to fix something, anything, and hurt himself. (When I last saw him, age 89, he was still able to bend at the waist and pluck his hated dandelions out of the ground from a standing position, so he remained physically strong till the end.)

My grandmother outlived her beloved Bill by almost 14 years, dying in June 2009 at age 98. One day, years into her widowhood, she and I went for a walk on her road, the same road as the family cemetery, and she mentioned him.

“I miss your grandfather every day,” she told me, as if this was something she had been thinking about. “I’m not interested in joining him just yet, but I know he’s waiting for me.” 

 

Retailizations

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A coffeehouse in France (okay, that right there may be one of the greatest four-word phrases I have ever typed; one almost does not need to continue. Please return from your daydream when you feel up to it) … . A coffeehouse in Nice, France (oh, come on, does this anecdote just keep getting sweeter? The setting may as well be, “A coffeehouse located in Sweet Kisses in Everyone Is Always Smiling Land”) … and, yes, I certainly know that the city’s name is pronounced “neese,’ and not the easy way to a punny joke, but a pun is a pun. 

coffee

Photo from Gawker.com

A coffeehouse in Nice, France, has posted a new price board, seen above and explained in “This Coffeehouse Will Charge You Less if You’re Nice.” If you stride up to the counter and demand a coffee, you will be charged 7€, which is approximately ten bucks and a typographical nightmare. If you say, “Please,” after, you will receive a discount. If you request the coffee and service in the more formal, polite, fashion, you will be charged even less. How great is this?

I worked at several retail jobs spread out over a quarter of a century. (I have also taught college composition, written for newspapers, and written and illustrated technical manuals. Either I have lived an interesting life or a shambling one; these are not mutually exclusive things.) I worked at a bookstore, an electronics retailer, a department store. At each, I desired the power to post a similar sign: a “ten-percent politeness discount on all hardcovers; twenty percent off before 11:00 a.m.,” at the bookstore, say. 

Retail clerks (sales associates, as we are more commonly titled now) occupy a couple different spaces in the average customer’s psyche, it seems. At the bookstore, there were customers who seemed to believe that one of the requirements for employment was that we had read every book in stock, and maybe every copy of each title. Some acted like they saw it as a personal challenge to find out which books I had not read. (At least once, after I had determined that a customer was playing this game, I started to insist that I had not yet read a book–any book–and that I just liked working retail jobs. “I’d like it more if we sold socks,” I told him.)

At the electronics retailer, it was assumed each of us working there was secretly a computer programmer and desktop publisher and ham radio operator who had not yet been discovered and, in our pure-hearted love of working a low-paying retail job as opposed to working as a high-paid consultant, we would/could/should provide professional-level advice for however much we were getting paid. Or for the fee of free.

Both customers are the same, of course, and they have a reasonable desire. Who doesn’t want to discover one’s own personal shopper at every store one walks into? We all want to be insiders. There were many customers at the bookstore with whom I shared great literary conversations and learned to anticipate their next reading needs, and there were many many customers at the electronics retailer.

But if I am your perfect personal shopper, I am probably letting someone else down. (While I was selling furniture at the department store, I had a customer ask me if I thought one couch was more comfortable than another. You know something? Furniture is a surprisingly personal choice. The couch I find comfortable might strike you as high-backed and about as inviting as a bus-station bench.) 

Other customers see the clerks in stores as interchangeable and invisible. Those are the customers the French coffeeshop is addressing. These are the customers who are supremely irked by the fact that a store opens at a certain time and not earlier–when they are there–or in fact has to close at a given hour–again, when they are there. They want to be treated as exceptional and important even as they treat the employees as the equivalent of a store fixture like a shelf or a display. This customer is the only customer who will actually say out loud to a clerk, “The customer is always right.” 

To handle this customer, I learned the “manager trick”: I would anticipate an impending complaint, announce preemptively that I would voluntarily involve the store manager in the conversation, sally forth to the backroom, and conduct the following conversation:

“Hi. Have you heard my chat with so-and-so?”

“Yes. It sounds like you know what to do.”

“I told her (or him) that I would demonstrate sympathy with their side to management, so I am speaking with you now.”

“This is a positive show of solidarity. But you’ll tell them I won’t budge, whatever the conversation is about.”

“Yes. Who are the Yankees playing tonight?”

I would return to the front of the store and repeat what I had been telling the customer all along, but with the added rhetorical support of the manager’s “words.” It usually worked.

It always worked, except once. I stupidly confessed to a friend that I sometimes employed the “manager trick,” and explained what it is, thinking it would amuse him. A few days later, a mutual friend began to negotiate something with me at the store. When I explained that I was going to speak with my manager, he accompanied me step by step to the back of the store. My friend had betrayed my secret.