Home of Economy News

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Getting Ready For Crazy Days!

I can’t believe how long I let this thing slide.  I apologize.  I hope to do better, although I do have some time off next month so we’ll have another short hiatus in the middle of the month.

In the last couple weeks we counted the Grand Forks store.  I was really happy to find that at the first look we were overall within 5 hundredths of a percent.  That’s netting out the longs and shorts so we do have some issues to work through, but it shows that we’re not doing too bad.

On Saturday the Grand Forks Store has our annual Crazy Days event.  This used to be a lot bigger thing for us.  What’s happened is that we’re about the only retailer that still participates.  Less people come to town so it’s kind of a flop. 

The other thing that’s happened is that the date for the Grand Forks Crazy Days has moved around.  In the old days it was always on the the first Monday of August.  That’s important because a lot of Canadians have that day off.  They’d show up in droves, cars and buses.  When North Dakota began opening Sundays we had it on Sunday and Monday.  Since ND opens at noon on Sunday it REALLY led to a busy opening. 

For some reason some retailers wanted to move their sale up a week.  We tried following suit but that didn’t work for us.  We were disappointing too many of our Canadian customers.

Finally a year or two ago we decided the heck with them.  We were going to do our own thing and if anyone else wanted to follow suit sobeit.  We’re back to the Saturday and Sunday before the first Monday of August. 

We still have a good Crazy Days but it’s not like the old days.

Friday, July 03, 2009

Happy Independence Day

Our Grand Forks Store will be open from 9am to 5 pm on July 4.  All of the other branches will be closed.

Making the call to be open or closed is always tough.  We know that a lot of our customers will be busy doing other things.  On the other hand, we hate to disappoint someone who comes here because of something they need. 

I know I’m posting this a day early but I wanted to get our hours out there.

Every Day Low Price on Kingsford Charcoal

We are constantly reviewing products to see how we’re doing and where we’re missing out.  One thing that we’ve been missing is on our charcoal sales. 

Way back in the old days we used to be buying this stuff two truckloads at a time.  Changing habits and new competition had pretty much gotten us out of that business.  I don’t know how much of it is sold anymore because of the prevalence of propane grills.  Still it should be a a good seller and we were missing out.

We’ve just lowered our price down to $8.49 for the 18 pound bag.  That puts us right in there with all of the big chains. 

In order to be #1 in Weber Grill sales we have to be in the business of serving the customer who already has a grill.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Jamestown Inventory

On Monday and Tuesday we were down in Jamestown doing an inventory.  I don’t think anybody really enjoys it, but we all know it needs to be done.

We don’t think we can be a great store without accurate inventories.  One classic saying of the retail industry is having the right product at the right time.  Without an accurate count in the computer we have no way of reaching that.

A store like Home of Economy has a much harder time than your mass merchants with this.  We sell a lot of specialty items that you don’t need that often.  In many cases we need to have two of an item on the peghook.  If we have one we lose sales.  If we have three we don’t make money on that one particular product.

Having a bad inventory whether it shows more or less than we actually have loses us money.

Doing inventories isn’t cheap.  We have to close for more than a day.  (We usually close early on the first day, work until 11pm and are closed the next day.)  That costs us a lot of money and disappoints some customers which we hate to do.  It also costs us a lot to move our team members around and to pay overtime we wouldn’t otherwise be paying.  Not only that we have an opportunity cost of what we would have accomplished during that time if we hadn’t been doing inventory.

We scheduled 3 inventories this summer.  We’ll do all of the stores in January and February.  I have to say this inventory went well in Jamestown, but it’s still a ton of work.