2018Issue1_Alabama_v2.indd

VIEWPOINT

“Now malls seem irrelevant, with many made marginal in their appeal by e-commerce.”

County Boys’ held on until the late 80s, but I think it’s fair to say that a lack of competitive response, and a willingness to continue doing things the way we’d always done them because that’s the way things were done, killed the business. It was a long, slow death, but it taught me a lot. Complacency is as sure a killer of businesses as pretty much anything else. Times have changed. Now it’s malls that seem irrelevant, with many made marginal in their appeal by e-commerce. But certain competitive tenets seem like they are worth adhering to creating compelling, unorthodox, loaded-with- personality shopping experiences wherever possible… offering people the ability to sample the merchandise whenever possible… maintaining a vigilance that lets no threat go unanswered, ever… and never allowing oneself to be complacent. Of course, I learned something else from all these experiences – that I’d rather write about the business of retailing than actually do it. But that’s another story. ■

I ended up working again for County Boys’ after college, when I returned east and got a $6,500-a-year job as a newspaper reporter and needed to supplement my income. County Boys’ was a classic clothing store that existed for decades in several locations – the kind of place where moms would bring their sons for everything from navy blazers to Levi jeans to underwear, and where fathers would come in Saturdays to buy a suit or dress shirt to wear to work in Manhattan. We knew all the customers, and they knew us, and they wouldn’t think of shopping anywhere else. We had fair prices – not high, but not discount – and ran just two sales a year, and never opened at night or on Sundays. It was a different time, and we were both convenient and a known entity. And then malls happened. County Boys’ had its stores either in stand- alone locations or in strip shopping centers, and the building of enormous malls nearby put enormous pressure on sales. Kids didn’t want to get their jeans at County Boys’, but wanted to go to The Gap instead. Moms could take their kids to the mall and have a wide range of choices, as could fathers looking for new suits. As hair got longer, sales receipts got shorter, and we never really figured out a response.

Again, a great lesson. Offering tastes of whatever it is you are selling is an enormously effective way to get people to buy stuff. And I’m not talking about just relying on manufacturers to underwrite tasting programs, which is nice but doesn’t go nearly far enough. I’m talking about retailers getting their own people out from behind service counters, or into the aisles and ripping open packages, and funding its own aggressive tasting stations. If it smells good and tastes good, people are far more likely to buy it. Alas, Brookside ended up closing down several years later, though I think it has been reborn several times under different ownership. I just don’t think the wine was good enough at a time when Northern California wines were getting better and better, and often less-than-premium locations became even less so in the mid-70s when gasoline was getting very expensive. But the lesson stuck. Finally, the other retailer I worked for was back east, in the suburbs of New York City where I grew up. I started working at County Boys’ and Men’s Shop before my 14th birthday – I had a private, Catholic prep school to pay for, I was the oldest of seven children, and my father was a schoolteacher who wanted me to go there, but couldn’t afford to pay for it.

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ALABAMA GROCER |