Home of Economy News

Thursday, June 25, 2009

High Tech T-Shirts

I had a 2 1/2 hour meeting with the Carhartt man this morning.  He was showing us the new colors and items coming out next spring.  They’ve got a lot of product improvements, but since Carhartt does SO well in basics the changes aren’t anything huge.  Mostly just tweaking their great product line.

We’ve carried the Carhartt Work Dry t-shirts for a while, but this was the first time I thought to ask what makes them so good.  I thought the answer was pretty interesting.

The shirts are a cotton/poly mix, but they layer the fabrics so the poly is on the inside.  That makes the sweat wick away from your body into the cotton where it’s more easily evaporated.  The effect is to keep you dryer on the job.  That actually sounds like a great idea, because these shirts are sold to be used on the job for eight or ten hour shifts.  If you can stay dry and comfortable longer it has to be a good thing. 

The shirts also have some kind of odor control built into them.  I’m told it does make a big difference.

We sell a ton of t-shirts from Carhartt.  Most of them aren’t as high tech, but if you want them we’ve got it for you.  They come in both short and long sleeves as well. 

Our store guy and I met with him yesterday as well.  We ordered pretty much a truckload of new shelving to expand our Carhartt shops.  We’re selling so much of it that we need to take out other products to make room for more Carhartt. 

(Our buyer says I’m obsessed with Carhartt.)

Monday, June 15, 2009

New Summer Carhartt Ad

Update:  I posted the wrong video.  This was pointed out to me by the new guy we hired who’s job is to make sure I don’t look to dumb. 

I think this ad came off pretty well.  I think that Carhartt Jeans have an huge potential for growth for us.  They are a great jean, with a great name at a price you can afford.

It used to be that Carhartt was known, up here anyway, for their great outdoor workwear.  We are now selling quite a bit more of the first layer product even with the increases we’re getting on the insulated coats and bibs. 

Carhartt’s a great company. 

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Science Diet:  $10 Gift Card With Purchase of Large Bag

Here’s our latest Science Diet Commercial.  I think it’s a great deal, $10 Gift Card when you buy one of the large bags of food that are covered.  These are our biggest dollar producers so we’re saving a lot of money for people. 

You get a good view of my Saint Bernard.  He’s the biggest baby in the world.  He had to have surgery a couple months ago and the vet said that all of his blood levels showed him to be as fit as could be.  He’s been on Science Diet since he was a baby. 

Friday, June 12, 2009

Starting Saturday:  You Can Buy Your Minnows In Minot at the H of E!

So on Saturday Minot will be the third Home of Economy store to offer live bait in the store.  We already do a great job with bait in Grand Forks and Devils Lake.  Grand Forks actually sells more bait than Devils Lake. 

Some would think that you’d sell more bait at the lake then in Grand Forks.  The difference is of course is that there’s a lot more places to buy your bait in Devils Lake than in Grand Forks.  So we’ve pretty much got the market in Grand Forks. 

Of course if you buy your bait at Home of Economy you’ll get the best value for your money.  We don’t have the time to count out minnows.  We’ll fill up the scoop and give it to you.

We think that Minot will have the potential to do very well selling minnows.  It might take a while to change people’s habits, but given time it’ll do well.  That’s great for us, because we’re after the traffic for the rest of the store rather than worrying about making a lot of money selling the minnows themselves. 

Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Fire of 1987

I’m sure a lot of our customers have a vivid memory when the Grand Forks store burned on December 3, 1987.  The fire started soon after we closed and by the next morning the store was all but gone. 

The state fire marshal and a investigator hired by the insurance company came to the same conclusion that the fire was caused by a cigarette being thrown in a trash can.  When you look at the pictures you find it hard to believe that they could narrow it down like that.  The insurance guy explained it out to me and he did make a compelling case.  They knew what part of the store the fire started.  They combed that area and found the remains of a plastic trash can that was folded in upon itself.  He said that when a fire burns outside of a plastic trash can it falls over.  But when the fire starts inside of it, the can curls in and folds up. 

I’m proud to say that we were open up in the same location by September 19th of the next year.  We had temporary locations all over town almost right away.

I was showing our buyer from the deep South pictures of the aftermath and thought that while many won’t care, it would be interesting for those that were around back then. 

That’s the front of the store.  As you can see it’s pretty well gone.  What’s interesting in that is that under that rubble was a picture of my Grandfather and a plaque he received from the buying group he founded.  Those survived in good shape, somehow, and hang in our conference room today.

Another picture of the front of the store.  As you can see, the Pepsi machine almost survived.

This picture was taken about the same spot as the one above it.  The only thing is the cameraman was facing the other direction.  You can see the shop doors in the back of the picture. 

We had a very large presence by the Grand Forks and East Grand Forks fire departments.  Since we didn’t have a fire alarm in the old building it was too late to do much by the time they got here.

Here’s a picture of the North Entrance.  This entrance opened up in the sporting goods department in the old store.  We had plenty of parking there but the entrance wasn’t real popular with the customers.  When we rebuilt we shifted the building site and had the other entrance on the South Side opening into the Farm and Auto department.  This works much better for the customers.  Our traffic is very nearly split between the two doors except during the Christmas season. 

Here’s a picture of the back of the old store, where we had furniture.  As a reference in the background on the right you can see the two story warehouse that we still have.  The wall to the right was a block wall for the old warehouse behind the store.  That warehouse was heavily damaged.  We had it tore down because it didn’t fit in our plans for a modern store.

A complete loss.  The night of December 3rd was very cold that year.  I think it was the first night that winter where the temperature was below zero. 

The flag still flies over the rubble.  We saved that flag and had it cleaned.  We’ve got it in storage, although I don’t expect we’ll fly it again.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Stars and Stripes Flyer

You can also see it, in larger form on our regular website.

Home of Economy’s Stars and Stripes flyer has officially hit the streets today.  I say officially because there are a couple exceptions to a certain date of execution.

The first thing that constrains us is that not all of the publications that we want to be in are daily newspapers.  Some of the towns were in have a shopper that is stronger for advertising than the newspaper itself.  When that happens you have to change your insertion date. 

So in some markets, like Devils Lake, we are out on Monday.  Since that’s the case we have to be ready in all stores for the flyer.  That leads us to the second exception is that we’ve decided since we should spread the flyer around before it goes out in the newspaper.

That leads to the question of why we’ve picked Wednesday to be the day we release the flyer.  Traditionally this was a very strong day for the newspaper as the grocery stores advertised on Wednesdays.  They seem to have changed that but we haven’t. 

Our biggest publication, the Grand Forks Herald, is stronger on the weekends.  We haven’t switched to that because we have so many rural customers.  We’re afraid that if we drop our ad on a Saturday people from out of town might not get it before they make their own trip to town.  We figure that we should give the customer a couple days to plan.

Of course newspapers aren’t what they used to be.  We are adjusting by telling the customers that we have a flyer out in radio and TV advertising and that we have plenty of in store copies for them to look over.

It’s a challenging advertising environment.  Of course we’re lucky that we can even advertise on television.  Most of our peers are in markets that are too expensive to buy television ads.  You can advertise your image and some large categories in television advertising but nothing sells like a flyer. 

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Questions and Comments

The Home of Economy News site has been up since early in the year.  It’s taken a while but I think I’ve gotten used to posting everyday.  My adviser in these things says that is what it takes to get people to come to a site like this.  I’d like to get a couple more people here at H of E to help post here as well, but nobody’s volunteered.

I think the site is doing well, although the traffic hasn’t built as much as I’d like.  My adviser says to give it time.  I am putting it in some of our advertising because I think we do have a site that’s worth reading.  I’m trying to promote the business of course, but I’m also trying to discuss why we do things and what we’ve learned.

One of the things I’d like to be able to do is to answer questions and comments here.  We do have comments allowed on the site although they are moderated which means they have to be approved.  They’re moderated for a few reasons.  We do get a fair bit of spam already. 

Maybe you have something we do that bothers you and you don’t understand why?  Maybe I won’t understand why.  While nobody enjoys taking complaints it is an healthy thing to do (provided it’s a rational complaint.  Some people really do just complain to complain.)

I guess I’m not going to have abusive comments but I think I should publish and answer uncomfortable comments.  I also can take question via email which would be at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  (If you can’t link on it you can type (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) in your email program. 

Anyway we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Friday, June 05, 2009

The Friday Special!  Back To Jeans

For Friday’s special this week, I’m running our $5 off any pair of Jeans (one per customer.)

I know I ran this a couple weeks ago, but it seems like a very good offer.  Plus I didn’t want to have to wake up our advertising guy to make me another one.

The real reason is that I missed a day in the office when I ran to Jamestown on Wednesday.  Missing a day really seems to set me back on my office work.  As much as you enjoy making the trip I pay for it for a week or so. 

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Another Excellent Month

A lot of people are still asking how we’re doing in the current economic climate.  The short answer is that we’re doing very well.  We were up 7% in the month of May. 

I don’t have all of the detail I’d normally have since our main sales reporting module is still updating like I talked about earlier this week.  But we do know that five of our six stores are up.  The Williston store was down a bit because the oil activity is lower this year.  They do seem to be picking up again with the price of oil coming up. 

I hate to see the price of gas going up, but at least in North Dakota it’s good for some of our customers.  Even so I think rising gas prices are bad for H of E because so many more of our customers have less money to spend. 

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

A Giant Automatic Parts Washer

Here’s something you’d probably never guess that we sell.  This is a gigantic automatic parts washer.  It’s made by our pressure washer company Alkota.

So what you do is stick anything you want clean in that basket there up to and including an engine block and let it go to work.  It’s got a large reservoir full of cleaning solvent.  The machine heats up the solvent to make it clean better.  The factory guy that delivered it said you’ll let it go for a couple hours to get it really spic and span.

We’ve been an Alkota dealer for over 12 years.  They make a great hot water pressure washer and we sell a ton of them.  Well actually we have an expert, Donnie Johnson,  with years and years of experience selling them that does the work. 

We also repair and refurbish pressure washers.  Donnie will take in a trade of your old machine.

This is the first time he’s sold one of these parts washers.  I didn’t even know they had them. 

Here’s another picture with one of their stationary hot water pressure washers in the foreground.

Alkota is made and headquartered out of South Dakota.  It’s always nice to deal with neighbors. 

Our Internet Was Down Yesterday

Yesterday our internet was down for a good part of the day.  Not only that we were running statements for our charge accounts so we couldn’t use our “back office” computer system. 

Finally we started a purge of some old data from 2003 and 2004 on our sales reporting module on Friday.  That’s an enormous job and it’s still running. 

The most important thing is that all of our stores are operating without any glitches.  Some systems nowdays require a constant connection with your head office.  Ours doesn’t so as far as the customers could tell yesterday things were normal.

But with everything down yesterday our buyers pretty much had their hands tied.  They didn’t have anything they could do.  I came in late in the morning because of a family commitment.  I puttered around a bit but after a couple hours I was wondering why I was here if I couldn’t do anything. 

The systems today are fantastic.  We have information at our fingertips that would have taken hours and hours to get in the old days.  But that comes with a price.  We’ve become totally dependent on keeping the systems up.