2018Issue1_Alabama_v2.indd

VIEWPOINT

H i s t o ry L e s s ons

KEVIN COUPE FOUNDER, MORNINGNEWSBEAT.COM

A confession: I’ve worked for three retailers in my life, and all of them went out of business.

fit the many flight attendants (then called “stewardesses”) who lived in Marina del Rey and Playa del Rey, and upon whom he was fixated. It didn’t help that he’d often go off for afternoon-long “lunches” with some of these women, leaving me to run the place by myself. I was good at my job, but I didn’t have the secret sauce that he’d used to make the place so successful. Eventually, the place died. But I still had college to pay for, so I got another retail job at the Brookside Winery and Tasting Room, also in Marina del Rey. The one where I worked was one of a network of several dozen facilities that operated mostly in California; Brookside was a Southern California vintner, and its operating strategy was not just to sell wine, but provide a tasting room in which anyone could taste any of the winery’s products for free while making a purchase decision. I didn’t know all that much about wine, but I learned fast, and I was pretty good at socializing with the customers, who often would come in knowing what they were having for dinner but not sure what they wanted to drink. They’d taste some stuff, make a decision, and we’d send them out the door happy and with a couple bottles of wine. And I got to run the tasting room (Great job for a college senior!).

It was a very cool store; the owner, only a few years older than I, eschewed standard design techniques and instead scattered handsome antiques – tables, desks, even a brass bed – around the store and displayed designer jeans, khakis, sweaters and shirts on them. The antiques were placed at odd angles that forced people to walk around the store, we were constantly moving pieces so that it rarely looked the same for too long, and the boss cultivated a salon-like atmosphere in which people loved to come in and talk and maybe have a glass of wine while they spent money on clothes. I think about the British Stock Exchange now and realize that it would have been the kind of store that could’ve competed effectively with online retail (had it existed back then). The whole point of the store was to create a compelling shopping experience – fueled by my boss’s outsized personality – that people would go out of their way to visit. And it worked, really well. Until, as often happens in these cases, the owner took his eye off the ball. Rather than remaining focused on what worked and expanding in a strategic way, he decided to make an enormous investment in a women’s line of clothing; the problem was, it was cut so small that it would only

While that may not make me the ideal guy from whom to be taking advice and analysis about retailing, I actually think that my long- ago experiences with these retailers offer some lessons about how to succeed. I’ve been thinking about those retailers lately as I’ve been pondering some of the events of the past year and trying to prognosticate about what might happen in 2018. I generally try to stay out of the predictions business lest someone think I’m trying to cast myself as some sort of futurist. (I’m just a guy who has made some pretty good – and lucky – guesses over the years, which is the same as what “futurists” do, but I try to be a little less pretentious about it.) Two of the retailers I worked for, as it happens, were in Southern California, and have been gone for more than 40 years; my jobs there were not “career jobs,” but rather a way to work myself through college. (I graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 1977.) The first was called the British Stock Exchange, and when I started working there in early 1975, it was a men’s clothing store targeted at a group that had not yet been labeled as “yuppies,” or the young urban professionals who lived in Marina del Rey.

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