The building site for our new store in Minot sits on top of an old coulee.  There’s as much as 35 feet of fill in some places.  We suspect that the fill was put in by the road department when they built the roadways in that area.

You can’t build anything on top of soil like that so we are having to stabilize the soil.  What we’re doing is having a specialist come in and drill 640 holes down to the good soil.  Then gravel will be packed into the holes.  Once they’re done, in about a month, we can build on top of their work with no problems.

It’s a pretty cool process.  We have the best location in town, perhaps in the entire state.  We’re really glad that we can rehabilitate the site and be able to use it.

I’m going to try to post here more often to keep the public up to date with the projects that we have going on. 

Here’s a new rendering of the Minot store with the signage included on the building.  Since we have such a great location we’re going to use as much signage on the building as we can.

I think this is going to be a great store.

Our venerable sign is being redone.  We are going to have it taken down and have everything redone.  As far as I know the sign has been there untouched for 50 years.  You can see in this picture that it’s certainly time. 

We intend on keeping the neon.  The company doing the refurbishing thought that we should update the neon to LED’s but to me that doesn’t replace the classic neon look.

The store will be three times as large as our current building.  While it won’t be overly fancy it will be a huge step up from what we currently have.

We haven’t been that good at keeping up with our news site, but this site will be a great way to keep people informed of what’s going on. 

We plan on doing quite a bit of hiring for the new store before we open.  If you’re interested in getting in on the ground floor of our Minot upgrade, now would be a good time to apply.

The store will be three times as large as our current building.  While it won’t be overly fancy it will be a huge step up from what we currently have.

We haven’t been that good at keeping up with our news site, but this site will be a great way to keep people informed of what’s going on. 

We plan on doing quite a bit of hiring for the new store before we open.  If you’re interested in getting in on the ground floor of our Minot upgrade, now would be a good time to apply.

We are opening up at 8am with our Giant Christmas Gifts flyer PLUS a one day only sale.

So go ahead and sleep in a bit on Friday and we’ll have the coffee on for you at 8 am.

Here’s our testimonial ad that we’ve ran since the summer.  We normally only do ads with item and price, but once in a while it’s nice to try to establish your identity out in the marketplace. 

I thought this ad turned out well and it hit a number of really big categories like Tires, Batteries, Honda, Carhartt, FR. 

This is the first ad we’ve posted for some time.  Formally I posted them on Yahoo Video due to bandwidth considerations here in Grand Forks.  We’ve upgraded so we’ll start posting the videos to Youtube which isn’t going to disappear like Yahoo Video did.

Home of Economy has had layaway for as long as I’ve been around.  We think long and hard about taking away a service that our customers need. 

Layaway isn’t a cheap service to offer.  The biggest cost is what to do with the products if someone doesn’t pick up the products.  A lot of the time the season for those products (toys at Christmas for example) is past and we wind up selling the products for a discount.

On the other hand it’s a service that many of our customers have appreciated over the years and we’ve never been willing to tell them no.

The actions by these national retailers show that we’ve been right all along.

This year we made the commitment to be your Honda Power Equipment Headquarters in our stores in Williston, Minot, Devils Lake, Jamestown, Grafton and Grand Forks.  It’s certainly been worthwhile as our sales on generators, pumps and lawn mowers exceeded our expectations.

Now we’re making room for the Honda Snowblowers.  We had a lot of snow last year so we expect that a lot of people have saved their money to buy a Honda Snowblower this fall.

If you want to get the best snowblower you’ll want to buy the Honda which has reach the acme of perfection in electric start snowblowers.  They are a great tool that we need up here in the North. 

They’re in the stores now and remember we have them at the Guaranteed Lowest Price. 

If you want more details you can get the crib notes at the Honda Power Equipment website.  http://www.hondapowerequipment.com/products/requestbrochure.aspx

The Legion did a story on the back page of their newspaper and were nice enough to give us some publicity.

My last post here was on the monster pressure washers that we sold out in the oil patch.  That was such a success that we’ve brought in the granddaddy of them all.  This pressure washer will feed two guns at 5,000 psi at 4 gallons a minute. 

I don’t think you want to use that your car, unless you don’t like the factory paint. 

This is a shot of the engine.  I didn’t get the details but it looks heavy duty to me. 

And finally this is the pressure pump. 

We actually brought this out on spec, but we do have someone looking at it.  When we sell it it will be the most expensive item we’ve ever sold.

This hot water washer serves two washing wands that can clean with 3,000 psi at 4 gallons per minute.  That’s amazing performance.  The water tanks are there for a couple reasons.  You’d have to have pretty good water delivery to keep up with the pump.  Having the tanks evens that out.  The other thing is of course is that the unit is portable and you can haul it to where you have the work.

We’ve just sold two of these out to the oil patch.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t become a big business for us.