Home of Economy News

Monday, January 25, 2010

Williston Inventory Has Been Postponed Due to Weather

Well the weekend blizzard finally hit on Monday.  There’s no way we can send people out of town in this storm so we’re postponing it for now.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

And Now to Devils Lake

We’re soon off to Devils Lake to count all of their stuff.  This should be an easier inventory than the Minot and Grand Forks inventory.  Not that those went too badly, but Devils Lake has less stuff than the other two and their backroom is almost negligible.

Our Schedule is to leave for Devils Lake from Grand Forks right after lunch.  We’ll close the store at 3pm and count until 11 pm or so.  Any later and we start making a lot of mistakes.  But every hour we work late on the first night means we’re home that much earlier the next.

This is also one of the stores close to Grand Forks and in the middle of Grand Forks, Minot, Jamestown and Grafton so it’s easy for everyone to get there.  We’ve started using the meeting room at the Devils Lake Casino to hold some vendor meetings because it is so convenient.

The problem with doing so many inventories is two fold.  First of all you get wore down while your regular work piles up.  The other thing is that there’s a lot of work fixing discrepancies after the inventory when you have two or three inventories.  We’re almost ready to close Minot, we’ve just started working on the Grand Forks reports and we’re off to do Devils Lake. 

It’s important to work the after inventory reports.  We cut the discrepancy in Minot 70% after the inventory.  Right now it looks pretty good. 

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Inventory Weekend for Grand Forks

Our Grand Forks store will be closing at 3pm this afternoon for inventory.  We will be counting EVERY item in the store today and tomorrow.  We’ve already got a crew working on the back rooms and the furniture department. 

Tomorrow morning at 8 am we’ll be back at it.  We’ll maybe be done around 7 or 8 Sunday.

It’s too bad we have to be closed for an entire day, but we can’t figure out how to keep the inventory accurate without doing so.  And if we don’t have an accurate inventory we won’t have the product that you need on the floor when you need it.

We’ll see you Monday morning.  Well, maybe not.  The kids are off from school and my wife is going to be out of town helping her Aunt so I have to take the day off.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Flame Resistant Clothing At Home of Economy

We are the leader in Flame Resistant Clothing in North Dakota.  We’ve been selling FR clothing from Carhartt, Wrangler and Walls Manufacturing.  We don’t sell a lot of it from Walls but they’ve got sizes up to 5X.  Last year with the new OSHA regulations we made a commitment to be able to supply FR clothing to our customers that need it.  These include electricians, welders and petroleum workers.  (I’m not an expert on the requirements.  If you have a question you should ask the safety officer in your company who ultimately is responsible for ensuring compliance. 

We’ve been reviewing our 2009 year and one of the BIG winners was the FR category.  It went from nothing to being a big deal for us.  If the category was a stand alone vendor it’d be in our top 30 vendors.  Most of the business is special order through the employers but we carry a pretty good selection in our Grand Forks, Minot and Williston stores. 

2009 was great for FR clothing at Home of Economy.  We intend to do even better in 2010. 

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

We Sell Honda Generators In 4 Stores

Late last fall we started selling Honda Generators in our Williston, Jamestown, Devils Lake and Grafton Stores.  We’d like to sell it in all stores but Honda has a policy of protecting their existing dealers.  That’s ok with me provided they’d do the same for us. 

Honda Generators are a great product.  If you have a need for a quiet generator or a generator that’s going to be run a lot of hours you can’t do better than an Honda.  We’ll keep selling the lower priced ones because there’s a market for those as well.

Here’s a short video I clipped from their product DVD.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Feed Test

I’m just checking to see how the Facebook and Twitter feeds work. 

Update:  Our in-house pro fixed it so that the Twitter feed links only go directly to the Home of Economy news site here.  There’s no point to link to our Facebook page if the real content is here.

Inventory Season

Sorry for the lack of posts last week.  We were busy getting started in our inventory season.  On Wednesday and Thursday we counted everything in the Minot store.

This weekend we’re doing the Grand Forks store.  We’ll be closing in Grand Forks around 3 pm and opening up Monday morning at 8 am.  We’ll have a crew working before we close counting the back rooms and some of the slower moving stuff.

Inventory isn’t any fun.  But if we have to keep our inventories accurate so we have the right products for our customers at the right time.  You can’t do that without an accurate inventory.  And it doesn’t seem anyone can keep them accurate without shutting down and COUNTING THE STUFF.

We’ll get done Sunday evening.  We will be back at in counting the inventory in Devils Lake next Wednesday and Thursday. 

I’ll try to keep somewhat current on the H of E news site, but it gets tough to do the extras during the inventory season.

New Battery and Tire Ad

This is such a strong Battery and Tire Ad we decided to update it when the products in it became obsolete. 

We originally ran this last fall.  The one tire style got discontinued by our manufacturer.  The Battery company changed their labels.  Aside from that we kept the same ad. 

I suppose some will wonder why we didn’t just put together a new ad since we have run this quite a bit.  It’s our understanding that consumers don’t pay that much attention to television ads.  The more you can repeat the better off you are.  What we’re trying to do is to make people think Home of Economy when they need a new set of tires or a new battery.  I think this ad does that well.

I also like the ad because it was shot in North Dakota and people will recognize the terrain.  For a second I thought they shot the ad near my home. 

I also love the start “How do you get to be #1.”  We’re the hands down leader in tire and battery sales in our towns.  We’ve got to brag about our position because I don’t think the competition is going to do it for us. 

Thursday, December 31, 2009

It’s the Home of Economy New Years Sale

Save 15% on nearly everything on New Years Eve and New Years Day.  Even off of sale prices.  We opened a bit late today because on New Years Eve and New Years Day we’re running 15% off of nearly everything in the store. 

We started doing this a few years ago.  What we were finding that it wasn’t worth being here on these days unless we gave the customers a very good reason to come in.  While we might be losing some money, any sale is better than none.

We do have some exclusions that we more or less stick with during percent off sales.  Those exceptions are:

Ammunition
National Brand Oil
DeWalt and Makita power tools
Gift Cards
Power Ice Drills
T-Posts
Salt
Gun Safes
Electronic Fishing Aids (Depth Finders)
Honda Generators
Trailers

No Prior Sales Limited to Stock on Hand. No Special Orders. No transfers.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Our 2004 Carhartt Anchor Ad

Yesterday I posted our great new Carhartt ad.  Back in 2004 we started a news anchor campaign to advertise Carhartt.

That ad campaign was very successful.  Before that our sales were very strong.  Now our sales are about 4 times what they were then.

We’ve worked hard to link the Home of Economy brand with the Carhartt Brand.  I think these ads were quite successful.  I’ve heard of people around town asking people in other businesses where “the Carhartt Store” is when they wanted us. 

Music to my ears.

Here’s the first (or close to the first) of our anchor ads just to let you know why we’re running ads like this.  Of course this ad is very old and the prices and offer aren’t in effect. 

Aaron there did a great job.  Unfortunately he moved out of the area so we can’t use him anymore.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

New Carhartt Ad!

Here’s our new Carhartt Video.  We had a lot of fun with this one. 

A few years ago we ran some distinctive “anchor” ads.  Those seemed to really work well for us.  Since the guy that was our anchor has left the advertising agency we needed to do something different. 

This was our idea for now.  I think that it’s an ad that will get noticed.  If you don’t get noticed the ad isn’t worth a darn. 

I thought the gimmick that we’re all wearing Carhartt in the board room was a neat gag to show how fired up we are about Carhartt products.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Grand Forks Snow Pictures

Here’s some pictures of the Grand Forks Store this morning.  Our snow removal guys still haven’t got everything cleaned up.  You can see that it was quite a job. 

But don’t let the snow piles scare you.  We were 100% open as of yesterday at the opening of business.  I think the team did great doing what they could on Saturday to get what they could open open as soon as possible. 

My Great-Uncle Dwayne had a picture in his office in the old store of the 1966 blizzard from the highway.  That picture was taken apparently from the highway of the front of the store.  If memory serves the snow in that blizzard was as high as the highest snow in these pictures although it seems that the snow in ‘66 was that high all the way across the parking lot.  Of course that picture was destroyed in the 1987 fire. 

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Grand Forks, Devils Lake Stores Are Open

I don’t like to bump people’s elbow’s when they’re doing their best.  I haven’t talked to the store managers lately but we’re showing sales in all of the stores except for Minot.

Grand Forks to Open Up at Noon

I just heard from our associate store manager that we will be able to open up in Grand Forks at noon.  He’s been struggling to open the lot. 

Right now we don’t have anyone in there to answer the phone, but we have two cashiers coming around then. 

The Grafton manager is in the store.  He opened a bit late as he had 3 feet of snow around his pickup.  Not many people are out.

The Great Christmas Snow Storm

We take it very seriously to be open on snow days because we sell so much emergency gear.  But when our crew can’t make it in then the customers can’t make it in either.

As of right now we have some people trying to clear out enough snow in the Grand Forks store so that we can open sometime today.  As of right now we’re not open, but we will later if we can.

The Minot streets are pretty much shut down and we aren’t open there but we’ll try around noon. 

The Jamestown store is open for now with the manager and one other.  Our Williston store is open.  I couldn’t get through to anyone in Devils Lake or Grafton.

I’ll update this as I find more information. 

We certainly don’t want anyone stranded (or getting stuck making the problem worse) trying to get to work.  On the other hand we have to balance that out with doing the best we can for our customers.