Black Friday from the inside

I just survived another “Black Friday”, except at my store, it was not a one day event.

Sales started the week prior and lasted until the end of this week. Things started earlier this year due to the pressure placed on us to hit higher sales numbers in the middle of the largest economic decline since 1934.

We didn’t get any extra help trying to hit those numbers, in fact inventory was lower this year and there were far fewer employees in the store. Making more with less sounds great in the boardroom, but it looks like hell on the sales floor.

To achieve more sales, with less stuff to sell and less people selling it, management dramatically increased the number of motivational e-mails sent to employees. Nothing overcomes a severe lack of resources like a well worded, even if not properly spelled, e-mail.

Drawing on sports analogies seems to be a favorite among the managers in my store. This weekend was called the “Supper Bowl of Sales” weekend. I think they meant Super Bowl, but let’s not quibble while we motivate. In keeping with the football theme, we were supposed to drive for the goal line and execute with a fever. We needed to pay attention to the basics of blocking and tackling while trying to hit home runs in terms of customer service.

Mixed metaphors must be some sort of subliminal motivational tool.

In addition to heaping piles of steaming motivation, we were fed some key statistics to help us visualize our success. This year’s goal was compared with last year’s results and more than a few exclamation points were used to urge us towards hitting our increased sales benchmark; in an economy where we are trending down 25%.

Do the folks at the top really think that if they click their heels together three times and dream of improved profits that the numbers they need to hit will magically appear? Where is the thought and the analysis that generates this type of unrealism?

And I am not alone, almost 30 million people worked behind the counters and in the aisles selling this weekend. Because of the pressure to hit sales numbers in a recession, those workers were asked to serve more customers, with less help and less inventory than ever before.

So how does a multi-billion dollar retailer plan to hit higher sales goals during the worst economic period in the last half century?

By doing exactly the same things they have done for the past 30 years and hoping for a different outcome.

Not only did they go into this crucial sales period with the same strategy, they actually tried to sell the same products, at the same prices, as they did last year. In fact we pulled down items that had been in the racks since last Black Friday to sell this Black Friday.

Only in big box retail could anyone get away with selling the same old products, at the same old prices, in the sale old way… but with less people and less inventory… and get senior executives, shareholders and board members to agree that maybe, just maybe, something good will happen. In a real business, this type of linear group think would get you laughed out the door. But the goal of managers in big box is not to do anything exceptional, but to do what others before them have done so you will have a plausible excuse for failure.

With so much money riding on this annual event, and the same 30 year old approach, you would think that we in the business would be better organized.

We’re not.

Inventory for the big event comes into the store starting in September. It is placed anywhere in the store where it will fit in the racks high above the selling floor. It will be taken down, and put back up no less than 7 times as various members of store management contradict each other regarding the proper placement of the product on the floor and the correct date that the product should be offered for sale to the public.

By the time the shoppers arrive, the displays have been moved so many times that they look like they have been dragged from China rather than brought by cargo ship.

Each product display comes with specific instructions about where in the store it should be placed and exactly how it should be presented to the customer. The problem is that no two managers in the store can agree on what the specific instructions say or what they mean. So round and round the product goes. In the end, it winds up being a better business decision to chuck the whole pile into the dumpster and save the labor costs.

The night before Thanksgiving we spent hours getting product properly priced and moving it yet again. This all because a manager that had been out sick when the other managers put in their two cents worth needed to feel like she was helping. She was also upset that she didn’t get a chance to send us a motivational e-mail.

The store opened on Black Friday at 6:00 am and not a soul came shopping until noon.

This was my third Black Friday at the same big box home improvement store. Sales in my store and across the district were down for the day. Our store, which is the strongest in the district, saw the weekend matching results from last year while the rest of the district never came close. Friday was slower, but Saturday, Sunday and surprisingly Monday picked up, saving sales for the weekend.

But that’s just sales.

Margin was in the tank. I know shoppers cherry pick the deals, but this year they were relentless. Nothing that wasn’t a significant discount from the “normal” price moved. There were no tie-in sales, no increase in impulse sales and no biting on seasonal in and out items.

In my 25 years at retail, I have never seen the shopper reacting so intelligently to the “deals” we offered. They knew exactly what they wanted to buy and they bought those items and only those items. I had customers calling in a week before asking what our inventory was and checking prices, they did their homework and stayed disciplined.

Traffic up, sales flat and margin below break even; tough way to make your quarterly numbers for Wall Street.

Management’s reaction?

Continue to cut labor costs by not hiring seasonal help and scheduling less hours for full timers. Ironically, the only thing that may have helped the margin was the lack of inventory on many items. You don’t lose money on stuff you don’t sell.

So imagine the morale of the staff as they faced the busiest weekend of the year with less people, while being forced to deal with angry customers who are looking for items that we don’t have. Not only did the weekend hurt the bottom line, we built up a ton of bad blood with customers.

This event was followed, almost by rote, with more motivational e-mails thanking employees for going above and beyond. No reward beyond digital pats on the back, no increase in the hours you are allowed to work and certainly no increase in pay for doing more with less.

Next come the motivational e-mails reminding us that we have less than 30 days to go in the calendar year and that our unused vacation days expire by the end of said year. The “motivation” here is the fact that we can’t actually do anything about unused vacation days now, because the company requires 30 days notice of vacation requests. Keeping all that vacation pay in the company till is a great idea, unless you are the employee who looses his paid vacation.

So thanks for all your extra work during the big “Supper Bowl” of sales and don’t forget that we are taking away those pesky vacation days you didn’t use.

Talk about adding insult to injury!

More Big Box Blues

I know my ranting about the pending demise of the big box retail format sounds crazy, but the facts are getting harder and harder to ignore.

The National Retail Federation just released the preliminary results of a survey where 8,500 respondents where asked about the customer service provided by retailers.

The retailer with the best service? Amazon. In fact, 7 of the top ten retailers don’t even have stores.

Details, such as they are, are here:

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10627227/1/amazon-kohls-top-for-customer-service.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEFI

None of the top ten are big box stores and I don’t yet know where they fall on the list, the full results won’t be released until January.

So just how important is customer service?

The top two retailers on the list, Amazon and Kohls, both posted great third quarter results in what may be the worst retail environment of the modern era. Amazon had a 69% increase in profits while sales rose 28%. Kohls posted a 20% increase third quarter profits and a 2.4% increase in same store sales.

Meanwhile, back in the big box, Lowe’s saw a 30% decrease in profits, Home depot was down 8.9%, Target held on with an 18% gain and Wal-Mart answered back by pledging to cut prices, yet gain, on 60 hot selling items for the holidays.

Holidays which, by the way, have started even earlier than ever. Black Friday sales started this week, a week before Black Friday, in Wal-Mart and Sears. Other big boxers are expected to follow suit.

What will the effect of this increase in price cutting have on future earnings? We’ll have to wait and see, but it just can’t be good.

KKR takes Dollar General public and I feel validated!

Just once I’d like to be right and rich!

Late last month I highlighted the growth of the “Super Discounters” and noted that one of the largest, Dollar General, had been taken private by KKR.

Well, this Friday Dollar General is slated to go public again and the buzz behind the offering is strong. The details are in this WSJ article titled: Dollar General Dresses Up for Its Debut, Deal is one of the year’s signature IPOs

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125772559135637369.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_markets

Naturally, I agree with the WSJ’s assessment when they agree with me.

I think they got it right when they talk about the company’s upside potential. But I had to laugh when an analyst stated in the article that he thinks consumers who traded down to the Super Discounters will return to shopping at Wal-Mart once the economy begins improving. His rational was "we contend that when consumers have more money in their pockets, they are less likely to shop in those channels (meaning stores like Dollar General) because the experience isn't as pleasant as in more moderate and higher-priced channels”.

Really??

The shopping experience is pleasant at Wal-Mart?

I’ve shopped Dollar General and I can tell you personally that it beats the stuffing out of shopping at a Big Box.

The store is easy to navigate, not dirty or run down, and it has everything you usually need for cheap. While not a day at the beach, the experience of shopping in a Dollar General was way better than at Wal-Mart if for no other reason than it saved me a half hour of wandering. I got what I needed and got out, with no one in line in front of me.

If you believe in the wisdom of “following the money”, then you have to take note that KKR is going public with Dollar General. Combined with the other factors affecting consumer behavior during this recession, the growth of this model of retail is a big reason why I think the days are numbered for your typical big box outlet.

The guys at KKR guys are very rich, because they are most often right.

Now, where’s my payday?

The Death Of Retail ?

Retail, as we understand it today, is undergoing a remarkable and fundamental change. Most in the industry don’t yet realize how dramatically different the retail environment will be in just a few short years.

Most are still talking about the current economic uncertainty as the cause for the changes in the industry. What they fail to realize is that the current state of retail is more than a simple temporary slowdown. It’s a fundamental shift being driven by several trends in the way America shops that are coming together to provide the “perfect storm” for the death of retail as we know it today.

Strong words I know.

Every time the American Consumer takes a break from the unprecedented 30 year spending frenzy they have been on, one pundit or the other calls for the end of retail as we know it.

In 1981- 1982 the stock market suffered one of its worst years in decades. Fortunes were lost and the warnings began that Americans were racking up debts that had reached unsustainable levels. I thought for sure that this would cause an adjustment to retail purchasing, but still the American consumer kept on spending.

On October 19^th, 1987 the stock market suffered what was up until then the single largest point drop in history. “Black Monday” saw the market loose 22% of its value in a single day. I went to the local mall to see how the stores were faring, and I couldn’t find a parking space.

Sept. 11, 2001, the day that America’s very way of life came under attack, did little to change the way America spends. After a brief time to morn, retail spending actually increased as President Bush reminded us that shopping was a patriotic duty.

Even the burst of the dot com bubble later in 2001-2002 did nothing to stop spending. Somehow, even though everybody knew it could not happen, the American consumer just kept buying at a torrid pace.

The warnings issued over the years were based on solid reasoning. Consumers in 2007 were spending more than they made. The savings rate in this country had actually fallen to a negative number. With consumer buying making up over 70% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product, there were strong indications that it could not continue. It’s because of these worrying trends that whenever the economy hit a rough patch, the calls for the death of retail rose in volume.

I had been though every one of these major economic upheavals and I had seen the consumer spend its way out each and every time.

So when the “Credit Crunch”, or the “Housing Bubble” or the “Economic Meltdown” or whatever nomenclature sticks, happened on Sept. 29^th, 2008, I went where I always go to see how the economy is faring, I went to the store.

What I found stopped me dead in my tracks.

For weeks, the aisles were empty. Almost nobody was shopping and nobody was planning to shop. Even those who were shopping were only spending what they absolutely had to.

For a full year, the American Consumer has stayed out of the big box retail shops in record numbers. It’s not a simple correction; it’s a big change in the American Consumer's buying attitude. One that may make the way retailers are operating today obsolete.

The trends driving the change coming to retail include:

The rise of frugality

• Unemployment
• Savings rate
• Garage sale chic

Going green

• Sustainability
• Buying local
• safety

Consumer intelligence

• Lessons learned
• The internet
• New Options

These trends will not be going away when the economy ”recovers”. I say that with some qualification, because it is very possible that the economy will never “recover” in the sense that things go back to the way they were.

It’s a whole new ballgame out there where increases in the stock value of large retailers will not be predicated on growth, where new shoppers don’t exist and where brands have no more importance than either outlet or price.

Institutional Intelligence

I just attended a sales training seminar which focused on how to do a better job of pushing products for the company.

I’m old. Really, really old. And I have been selling, in one form or another, for most of my adult life. I’ve had more than my fair share of “training”.

Selling, as my experience has shown me, is nothing more than solving problems…at a profit.

First you need to find out what the problem is, figure out how what you’re selling can solve the problem, and then determine to what degree the customer wants the problem solved, meaning how much money are they willing to spend to make the problem go away.

Now you have just been taught in one paragraph what it took a trainer half a day to teach.

I think they make these training seminars painful so that you’ll actually look forward to going back to work.

As a rule, I try to take any opportunity to learn. What I learned today is that my company has no idea how to teach product knowledge or selling skills.

It was amazing to learn how ill informed the salespeople at the training were. At best they had no idea about how to answer customer questions and at worst they have been giving customers simply dead wrong answers, sometimes for years.

The poor trainer may have been the most clueless of all. She had very little institutional intelligence she could shed on the training beyond having us open the book and watch the video.

So how, exactly, are you supposed to get the product knowledge that customers expect?

In the two years I have been with the company, this was my first training seminar. Sure, they show you video’s and make you take competency tests before you wander out onto the sales floor after orientation, but none of that training has anything to do with what happens in the real world. You are basically swinging without a net.

If you don’t come into the business with some knowledge about what you are selling, then you are forced to learn it on your own or hope that someone else in the department has an idea about how to answer customer questions.

As a Home Improvement Warehouse, our employees are supposed to be a font of knowledge for the customers who wander in. At least that’s what the TV ads all say.

Customers expect me to know which wood flooring is best for a dog that can’t stop peeing in the house, which products will protect ceramic tile from a cat that can’t stop throwing up, and the best way to get bleach stains out of the carpet.

Here’s an idea; train the dog, shoot the cat and don’t be stupid enough to mess with bleach while standing on the carpet.

I know that’s a little rough for you cat lovers, so if you’d like, you can shoot the dog or the dumb bastard that spilled the bleach, your choice.

So unless you are old like me and have come into contact with more than your share of dog pee, cat puke and bleach stains, you have no way of knowing how to respond to these, all too common, customer questions.

It can be frustrating for new employees which helps explain the huge percentage, in some cases 90%, of employees leaving within the first 30 days. Nobody wants to feel dumb, and you certainly don’t what to take abuse for being dumb from a complete stranger.

So you are left with using your free time to search out information on your own so you can become a better employee…at a salary of $11.50 and hour, or you have to depend on the senior people in your department, if there are any, to point the way.

That’s why nobody knows anything.

The information they get on their own may or may not be correct and the history handed down from the elders may be just plain crap. Either way, there is no real way to become smart about what you sell unless you do the work on your own.

Imagine a fireman that picks up his skills on the internet, or a doctor who reads a few brochures before an operation. I know those are extreme examples, but if you spent anytime with my customers you’d know that they do expect me to constantly pull their butts out of fires and to do brain surgery.

And the worst part is that the company, and store management, expects it too.

Why is there so little time or money allocated to continuing education for employees?

Why does the company put so much emphasis in their marketing about having well trained employees and then tells those employees, by their lack of commitment to any substantial training program, that they aren’t worth the time and effort to train?

The company believes that its employees are their most important asset. They just don’t think that you, as one of those employees, is all that important.

This is just another symptom of the emerging trends that will hasten the down hill slide of big box retailers. If you don’t invest in your people, then you loose a big part of the value you should be delivering to your customers. If your employees can’t give them the information they need, then they will find it someplace else, and that someplace else where be will they spend their money.

Here’s a new slogan for you;

“Let’s build something together…with you doing most of the work”

The Rise of the “Super Discounters”- Part II

I’ve blogged about how super low price retailers and a new class of “non-retailers” are threatening the dominance of Big Box stores.

So why are more and more consumers bypassing Wal-Mart? Is it simply because of the zeal to find the lowest prices? In my case it was that and a chance to get even with the brainiacs at Texas Instruments.

The story goes like this.

Late on Saturday our daughter informs us that she needs a graphing calculator for her high school freshman AP math class by Monday.

We knew this was coming. The calculator was on the list of school supplies we knew she would need back in August. But we had put off buying the calculator because the cheapest one we could find that fit the requirements cost $150.00. Some were retailing for upwards of $180.00.

So here we were, late into the weekend having to scramble to make a purchase that we really didn’t want to make. Being unwilling to risk our daughters’ acceptance into Berkeley over a lousy $150.00, I figured we were going to have to pony up the money.

We had a problem with the concept of spending that kind of dough for a variety of reasons.

My wife had a problem with spending the money because she didn’t see why a class in high school should require such an expensive piece of equipment.

I put off buying it because I simply refused to pay $150.00 for technology that Texas Instruments first introduced in the late 70’s.

Today’s $150.00 TI-89 bears a remarkable resemblance to the TI-58 launched by the company in 1977. I remember having to buy this calculator for my college classes, it cost about the same in 1983 as it does now. It was an ungainly piece of technology and I never did learn exactly how to use it.

My thinking was that if the cost of computers can drop from something like a million dollars in the 70’s to around $200 today, why is this piece of technology still being sold at 1970’s prices? I mean, my first cell phone cost me just north of a grand, but today I can pick one up for $29.00, not to mention that I don’t think my 1989 suitcase phone could take pictures.

Perusing the features listed on the packaging, I don’t think the TI-89 performs one iota better that the TI-58 did. And that brought back all of the painful memories of struggling with that damn calculator through statistics class. I was determined not to give those bastards at TI another $150.00 to be completely humiliated…again!

“Thank God for Craigslist”, were my wife’s exact words. She bypassed the usual retail channels and found a slightly used TI-83, which is the same as the TI-89 (and the TI-58 for that matter) being sold on Craigslist for a mere $50.00.

So late on Sunday, I take a trip to the local mall, not to go into the mall mind you, but to meet the owner of the TI-83 in the parking lot.

After a brief introduction and a quick review of the product, I handed the man $50.00 and drove home with our prize. I was happy to have gotten the calculator my daughter needed, but I was even happier about the fact that I had pulled one over on the jerks at Texas Instruments.

Who are these guys that think they have no need to adjust the prices of their beloved calculators to match the real world reduction in the costs of producing electronic devices?

And with that, a $150.00 in revenue is lost to the retail industry. It’s that type of transaction, which is happening everyday, that is speeding the demise of what we think of as retailers.

Wal-Mart may be able to offer the TI-89 at some reduced price, but even they can’t sell it for $50.00 and make $50.00 in profit like the man from Craigslist did.

This is a radical idea among most of the people in the industry that still talk to me. I have found that telling people how everything they think about retail is completely wrong doesn’t get you a great many returned phone calls.

Recently I tried to put the growth of this phenomenon into some kind of numerical perspective. I am attempting to correlate the trend towards these outlets with the movement of stock prices, more on that later, but here’s what I have so far.

The growth of the Super Discounters has been impressive, but is still in its infancy. The companies that provide numbers give some idea of the scale:

Company # stores Revenue

Family Dollar 6,500 $7.4 B

Dollar Tree 3,450 $4.6 B

Dollar General 8,414 Taken Private by KKR

99¢ Stores 279 $1.3 B

So no big threat here… until you consider that the segment is growing at a rate above 6%, during a time when most retailers are struggling to keep from shrinking out of existence.

It’s also telling that the biggest player has been taken private by KKR. Those are the folks who started the consolidation frenzy in the supermarket industry in the early 1990’s that drove company valuations through the roof.

Maybe they know something?

I’m just saying.

The second part of the argument is a bit harder to quantify. “Non-retailers” don’t report annual numbers. Craigslist has no clue how much of the stuff offered for sale is actually bought and nobody reports the profits from their garage sale, don’t take my word for it, ask the IRS.

There is some anecdotal evidence however.

The National Association of Resale and Thrift Shops (yes, this proves that there is a group for everybody) takes the pulse of the industry thought a series of surveys.

The latest NARTS results show that over the second quarter of this year the growth rate of the industry accelerated from a 5% annual figure to 7%. 64% of those responding had an average increase in sales of 31% and a 77% increase in new customers. 65% saw an increase in inventory offerings that averaged 28%. Most of the members reported that the inventory offerings increased in quality over previous years.

When was the last time you saw any big box retailer with double digit sales and customer traffic increases?

New stores, new customers and a new “Frugalista” mentality (the trend towards selling off your old stuff to buy new stuff) feeds into the future growth of this type of retail…at the expense of the status quo.

Nobody at Wal-Mart is afraid of these guys today, but I remember when nobody in the retail industry was afraid of Wal-Mart. These things have a way of creeping up on you.

Stay Tuned!

The Rise of The “Super Discounters”

Say what you want about Wal-Mart, everybody has. They are either the best thing to happen to capitalism since the creation of the stock option or a heartless cancer destroying the Global economy. Love it or hate it, Wal-Mart has had a significant impact on how retail operates.

They have also changed they way consumers shop.

This may ultimately be their downfall.

Their newest slogan, “Save Money, Live Better”, is a far cry from the original; “We Sell For Less”. It’s part of an overall attempt, the success of which is still undermined, to put the Low Price Genie back into the bottle. Wal-Mart has taught a generation of consumers that the most important thing in making a buying decision is finding the lowest price. It’s a strategy that has served them well, but it has given ammunition to the latest retailing trend designed to knock them off of their throne as the king of all retail.

Low prices are a powerful consumer motivator, but once your sales growth slows, along with increases in your stock price, you need to manage for profit. That’s why Wal-Mart is trying to wean it’s customers off of the low price addiction. Wal-Mart’s return to investors over the last 5 years is somewhere in the negative 25% range. A far cry from their heyday where the stock price was doubling ever five years and Sam was dancing on the floor of the NY stock exchange in a grass skirt.

The problem is that Wal-Mart has no customers. All they have is legions of shoppers looking for the lowest possible price. The average Wal-Mart shopper is loyal to only one thing, spending as little money as possible when buying the things they need to live a modest modern life.

Enter the Super Discounters.

These retail operators, some of which are not retailers at all, are re-defining low prices by driving down operational costs and offering just about anything they can get their hands on at prices dependant on factors other than volume. As an example, look at the genre known as the 99¢ store.

These operators set up shop in declining strip malls where overhead is as low as you can get without violating local zoning laws. The stores are small and minimally merchandised. They offer any merchandise they can buy, or rather scrounge, for less than a dollar. The merchandise mix will include products with mistakes in the packaging, products originally developed for export and what can only be described as rejects or from other retailers. Think of the Island Of Misfit Toys on steroids. For a great example of their merchandise mix, just watch Jay Leno. He has a famous bit where he goes shopping in a local 99¢ store and brings his more hilarious finds back to the studio.

But the proliferation of these types of stores is no laughing matter. They are positioned both geographically and pricewise to capture what has traditionally been the bread and butter customer for Wal-Mart. The shopper interested in nothing but low prices. Due to their reliance on cheap real estate, they tend to closer to where these shoppers live and their prices can not be beat using the traditional method of driving down costs by using huge volume.

They don’t rely on volume to get lower costs, they use opportunistic buying. This is a skill that Wal-Mart and other traditional retailers can’t copy. Their volume precludes buying what in the parlance of the business are known as “odd lots”. On the other hand, most of the operational advantages that helped Wal-Mart grow, such as computerized demand management and tight inventory controls are now standard in the industry and available to everybody at a fraction of the cost Wal-Mart incurred to develop them from scratch.

Then there are the non-retailers, the Good Will shops, thrift stores and the largest online non-retailers out there, E-bay and Craig’s List. These non retailers are taking money from Wal-Mart consumers in record numbers as the American population takes frugality to the level of sainthood. Garage Sale Chic is the new black. It’s hip to display how much you save rather than how much you spent.

And these retailers pay nothing for the merchandise they sell, it’s mostly donated. The workers? Well a majority of them are volunteers. How do you compete against a retailer who has no inventory or employee costs?

Traditional retailers can’t easily compete with the super discounters and the non-retail retailers without incurring huge operational expenses. They have to sit back as the Frankenstein monster that they created, known as the price conscious consumer, slowly bleeds out of their sales base. Trying to upgrade Wal-Mart is a herculean task that history has shown is highly likely to be a failure. Think of Kressge, Ames, the original K-mart and Woolworths, Once the customer gets it in his head that low prices is all that matters, they are difficult to un-educate.

With stores closing across the country, there is a nearly unlimited supply of “B” grade retail locations that can easily support a Family Dollar, Dollar General or 99¢ store. Some of them directly in the backyard of huge Wal-Mart’s, since they are the skeletons of the very retailers Wal-Mart put out of business. To the best of my knowledge, no one is organizing to keep a retailer from taking over a vacant building on the grounds that it will disturb the local area.

Add to that the fact that these stores can be run with no more than three employees at a time, some of which draw no salary and that they sell products picked up for pennies on the dollar, or given to them for free as donations, and you a have a recipe that is sure to give Wal-Mart nightmares.

Ricochet Recession

There is no doubt that things are beginning to improve in the retail environment.

This Labor Day I saw a huge increase in sales in my store. It kind of reminded everyone of the good old days when consumers spent more than they made and used their homes like ATM machines.

But it’s not the good old days; it’s still the bad current days. A reduction in the rate of decline in unemployment is just not the same as an increase in employment.

Sales have continued to be strong this past week and with any luck we should hit budget for the first time in close to a year, but it’s not time to pull out the Champagne.

Continued good news on the economic front is reason for hope, and I for one would love to see some life step back into the retail marketplace, it’s just that things will never be like they were because…well mostly because, they never are.

What we are witnessing now is the release of a great deal of pent up demand on the part of those 85% of consumers who have not lost their jobs, who have not had their homes foreclosed on and who did not loose a bundle in the stock market.

People can only put off spending for so long, some because they really need things like water heaters and washing machines, and others because the habit of spending is so addictive that they have been jonesing for a fix since January.

So while sales have improved and the pundits will soon start cautiously calling for an end to the recession, don’t be too quick to believe the next round of hype. Things are going to dip again real soon and the level of dip will depend on how strung out consumers get living it up on this pseudo-recovery spike in good economic news.

Anyone who has every driven the 405 in Orange County California knows about “Ricochet Accidents”. They are as common to the daily commuter as the infamous “SigAlert”.

As rush hour traffic, (or any hour traffic since the 405 through Orange County is always heavy) slows to a crawl, you will inevitably see people craning their heads out of car windows to see where the accident is. As people approach the accident, they instinctively slow down to look at it. In Orange County the rubberneckers are not just looking for gory details, they honestly think it might be somebody famous who is crying over the crumpled front end of the Escalade stuck sideways in the fourth of the seven lanes.

As soon as they clear the accident site, Cali drivers immediately accelerate to 85 MPH to make up for the time they lost seeing if Brittney would be appearing on the cover of People with a neck brace. Since everybody is going 85 MPH and changing lanes like Hollywood couples change spouses, there is sure to be another traffic accident no less than one and a half miles down the road. Hence the name “Ricochet Accident”.

That’s what we are about to experience in retail sales, a “Ricochet Recession”. Anyone who builds up inventory or adds too much staff right now will be in a world of hurt by the end of the year. This surge in spending might make it into the beginning of the holiday season and it will be hard to determine exactly if lower Christmas sales are result of the drop in pent up demand or of lackluster holiday performance, but the fundamentals of the recession are still too strong to allow for any real recovery until the second quarter of 2010.

This is not the end of the recession, not even close. Things are going to get bad again before they get better. The only question is how bad and for how long. The answer will vary from retailer to retailer depending on how individual retailers react to the current economic uptick and how well they prepare for the “Ricochet Recession”. Any attempt to back off of aggressive pricing and marketing to regain valuable margin dollars will be met with disastrous results.

In fact, I don’t see how big name retailers are ever going to get back the margins they have lost. I also don’t know how they are going to keep shareholders from revolting. I don’t see how the current model of big box retail can hope to increase shareholder value in a slow-grow to no-grow economic environment.

In addition, we can’t loose sight of the fact that consumers are going to school right now. They are learning exactly just how far retailers are willing to go to get sales in tough economic times. Just because they may start coming back into the stores after the first quarter of 2010 doesn’t mean that they will accept businesses going back to 2004 practices.

It’s going to be a whole new ball game when the economy “recovers”. The old way of retailing is entering an age of decline and new retailing models are rising from the economic ashes to challenge everything current retail mavens believe about how to make money.

It’s going to be very, very interesting.

Friday Plumbers

I’m no expert on home construction, but if you come into the plumbing department, I bet I can tell you if your rough plumbing was put in on a Monday or a Friday.

There is a definite difference between a “Monday” plumber and a “Friday” plumber. Early in the week, the professionals, and the not so professional, that come into my department are looking for very explicit items. They come in looking for specific pieces of pipe; “Do you have any 3 inch double wyes with a street fitting on a 45 degree with 57 count female thread along the downhill side of the coupling flange?”

They need just the right fittings and have very detailed explanations for why they need exactly what they need; “I have a dock that I need to plumb a sink on, I want to use brass fittings on the faucets and schedule 80 pipe for the drains. I’ll need a p-trap with an 18 inch 1-1/2 wall tube and the gaskets for the strainers have to be galvanized. Oh, and I’d like to use stainless steel in the strainer baskets.”

If I can’t provide them with what they want, they cheerfully state that they will just drive over the bridge to the plumbing supply house two towns over, that will probably take only 35 minutes or so even if the traffic is terrible.

By Friday, things have drastically changed. Many of these same professional, who are now not looking so professional, will grab anything on the shelf that they think they might be able to get to work. They wander the department looking for any help they can find from the boxes on the shelf, while mumbling about how they can probably can get it hooked up by using some of this (whatever they have I their hand), some JB Weld, and stuff they think they might have left over from an earlier job in the back of their truck.

If I can’t come even close to providing them with what they want, they get all red in the face and start threatening me. They seem to be very sure that I will be upset by them telling me that: “There is no way in hell I’m going to drive all the way over the bridge, to a plumbing supply house that is two towns away, while fighting 35 minutes of traffic that will be terrible.”

If you tell me that for some reason the fittings under you bathroom sink seem to fly off of the pipes every once in a while when you shower in the morning, I can assure you that they where installed late in the week.

If you gave me a tide chart and an approximate month when you think you house was nearly finished, I bet I could even pinpoint the time. I would guess, probably pretty correctly, that the sinks where plumbed sometime after two in the afternoon on a Friday when the fish were biting at low tide near the connector to the Isle of Palms.

I would further bet a week’s pay, that the valves on the pipes where fitted by the plumbers junior helper who I suspect didn’t have a great grasp of the English language. My guess would be that he probably attached the shut off valves to the pipes using the last bit of whatever glue he had enough left of in the bottom of the can.

It’s also a near certainty that he attached the valves with the same stuff he used to glue up the drain pipes in the crawl space under your house.

He probably didn’t get the message that the blue can gets used under the house and the black can gets used under the sink. He just used whatever he had left over since it was close to quitting time and the boss was on the water.

If your fittings come off under your sink whenever you and your two neighbors take showers at the same time as you , then it’s a good bet that one or more of your pipes are lying on the ground under your house, completely disconnected from the towns sewer system. If your fittings come off of the vales under your sink, then check for the smell of rotting eggs under your house. Both calamities are directly tied to the problem of “Friday” plumbers.

If you bring me the sections of pipe you had to cut loose to dislodge the well pump you need to replace for your sprinkler system, I can tell before you get even halfway down the aisle if your system was installed on a Friday.

Friday systems have about 7 couplings that just don’t need to be there and the pipe sizes jump around from ½ to ¾ and up to 1 inch and then back down again. Belligerent customers will tell me that they need to replace the sections with exactly the same stuff because that’s how it was installed.

Few believe me when I tell them that the way it was installed had more to do with what the plumber, if he was even a plumber, had left over on his truck on a Friday. They are convinced that they need the 2 inch male fitting that has been reduced to ¾ inch on one side and to ½ inch on the other by an ungainly series of nearly a dozen couplings, bushings and adapters. When I show them how in one step they can get from ¾ inch to ½ inch they simply remain convinced that they need exactly what they have because that’s what the guy did the first time.

When I ask them how long they have had the pump, they tell me the pump quit just about the same time as the warranty ran out. “My last one ran for 25 years without a problem, but this one was trouble from the beginning and I only got a year out of the damn thing!”

No sense pointing out that maybe the pump didn’t last because it had to push water through a series of jacked up fittings that were never designed to be used in the exceedingly creative manner with which they are glued together as set out before the both of us.

You just can’t make any money by telling people the truth. I simply grab up all the fittings they need to re-create the monstrosity of water that they brought into the store. Then I show them where the replacement pumps are on the shelf making sure to point out where the warranty card is in the box.

I also tell them about the 800 number the pump company provides in case they need any additional help installing the new pump into the old system. Just once I’d like to listen in on the phone calls when these guys try to explain how the pump is hooked up. I’ love to hear how they describe the water running to and from the pump through a PVC version of a Picasso sculpture.

When nursery, doesn’t mean nursery

Spend anytime in retail and you’ll find that intelligent people still ask incredibly stupid questions.

The list of questions I have tried to answer would go on for pages, but today I’ll just share the latest.

I had a guy ask me, in the lumber department, surrounded by 2 X4’s and roofing tar, if we sold canned dog food.

In retail, you are defined as much by what you don’t sell as what you do. You can’t call yourself a home improvement warehouse if you sell milk, eggs and cookies. We may be forced to try it if the economy doesn’t turn around, but for now, we are still making it selling “stick and bricks”.

The best question in recent times, however, came from a woman who wanted to know if we sold Pampers, as in disposable baby diapers. When informed that we didn’t, she appeared perplexed. She simply assumed that since the sign our front indicated that we had a nursery attached to our home improvement warehouse, then of course we sold diapers.

Go figure!

The Semi-Annual Employee Clearance Event

Every retailer is in a seasonal business. Sales go up and down in a predictable pattern depending on the time of year. When sales increase, retailers add employees and when sales start to decline, business 101 dictates firing employees to reduce payroll expenses.

It doesn’t matter that sales will pick up in a few months, retailers can’t handle even a couple slow months of lowered profitability. The irony is that when sales rebound from their seasonal lows, these same retailers will be hiring like mad.

So right now we are in the first of our two “Semi-Annual Employee Clearance Events”.

During this event, retailers play what I like to call Payroll Poker. In this game, retailers try to reduce the number of employees in the store while betting that customers won’t notice. If played correctly, the shoppers will continue to shop, and buy, even though there is a significant decline in the service provided by the retailer. If the retailer can keep the game going long enough, then the reduction in service will not drive down sales, while the lower labor costs improve profitability.

The thing is, customers are not stupid. They notice immediately when labor costs are lowered in the store. When shoppers can’t find what they want, or if they can’t get their questions answered regarding what they plan to buy because employees are non-existent …then they don’t buy. They simply leave and many vow never to return. Payroll Poker is a game that is won by the retailer only in its own corporate mind.

As service levels drop, due to insufficient staffing, the resulting decline in sales is chalked up by corporate know it alls as a symptom of the seasonality of the business.

Right now, due to our Semi Annual Employee Clearance Event, I have been covering three separate departments by myself. In good times, my single department is staffed by at least two and in most cases three employees.

I have personally seen between $300 and $500 in sales walk out the door in an hour because I couldn’t get to the customers to help them, or if I could get to them, then I didn’t have the knowledge necessary to answer their questions. So rather than ante up in the game of Payroll Poker, the customers simply folded and walked out.

On several occasions I have been faced with customers actually crying because they can’t find what they are looking for or anyone to help them. These poor individuals feel as though we are taking an active part in making them feel less than human. And perhaps we are, but it’s not personal, it’s only business.

Crying is an extreme example; most customers just seem to wander the cavernous store in a daze, hoping that someone will point them in the direction of the replacement furnace filters.

Nowhere in the corporate accounting system is there a ledger entry which records the dollar amount lost in these cases. There is no Excel spreadsheet column marked “sales lost due to pissed off customers”. There is also nowhere to track the amount of dollars lost because overworked and exasperated employees have simply stopped talking to customers that they can’t help.

In my experience, there is little in the world of retail that is more energy sapping than being forced to face exasperated customers. No employee wants to deal with a customer who has been wandering the store for the good part of an hour while trying to find what they want to buy or someone to help them. As an added benefit to the shopper, when they finally find me, I am not able to help them in the least because they are asking questions that I have no hope of answering.

In such cases it is not unusual for a customer to take out his or her frustrations on the only symbol of corporate malfeasance they can find; namely me. I have been cussed out, threatened and made to hear over and over again a litany of complaints about how our lack of concern for the customer is, in various cases;

Rude, bad business, inconsiderate, despicable, unacceptable, Frickin’ ridiculous, stupid, Frickin’ stupid, mean, nasty and downright inhospitable.

So as a defense mechanism, most employees simply stop trying to help customers in this situation. As labor cost decline, the number of angry customers that no one wants to help increases. We go from being a DIY retailer to a GIY retailer. From “Do It Yourself” to “Get IT Yourself”.

Service levels drop, employee enthusiasm declines and sales go into the tank.

The feeling among customers and employees during this game of “Payroll Poker” is amazingly similar. Neither the shoppers, nor the people paid to help them, actually want to be in the store.

The kick in the pants in this whole game is that eventually the Corporate Brain Trust decides that the level of non-service is unacceptable and they order the stores to add more staffing. This leads to a rush in hiring and the inevitable extra costs incurred to screen, hire and train all those new employees.

So soon the Employee Clearance Event will be replaced with the Hiring Anyone with a Pulse Celebration. Then the store will be crawling with clueless newbie’s who have no trouble telling customers that they have no idea where the furnace filters are. But hey, that’s retail!

How a day in the electrical department sharpened my use of deflection as a sales tool and almost saved the planet.

Today I was asked to fill in for a vacationing associate in the electrical department. The very though of it had me intimidated.

In plumbing, I don’t fret too much anymore about giving customers bad advice or about letting them go off with the fixes they insist on, even though I know that they absolutely won’t work. After all, we’re dealing with water and I figure that the worst that can happen is that people or property might get a little damp. Even with gas fixtures, the chances of things getting out of hand are relatively slim.

There was that one time, however, when I was sure that the barely English speaking guy was going to hook up the fryer in a Chinese restaurant with some highly flammable thin plastic tubing. I remember watching the news that night to see if there was a horrible explosion and fire at the Great Wall Dim Sum Palace. But with electricity, you’re into a whole new stratum of destructiveness. Combine the lethal nature of voltage and watts with my appalling lack of knowledge and you’re looking straight down the barrel of some big time trouble.

Me and electricity don’t mix. One of my first home improvement projects was a botched attempt to re-wire a ceiling fan. I could have sworn I turned off the breaker, but when my screwdriver crossed the circuitry, I awoke flat on my back, at the bottom of a four foot ladder, looking straight up at big, black scorch marks on the ceiling, while coming to in a fog of ozone. Before I could even check to see if my spinal cord had been severed, my mind screamed; “Shit! My wife’s gonna kill me when she sees that burn mark on the ceiling!”

Whenever I am asked an electrical question, I remember the line uttered by Michael Keaton in the movie classic “Mr. Mom”. For those of you younger than 30, or those of you that don’t remember the 80’s, in the movie Keaton plays a laid off auto executive who is forced to stay at home with the kids while his wife, played by Teri Garr, goes off to earn the daily bread. With his ego in tatters, Keaton’s character begins taking on home improvement projects in a botched attempt to reclaim his manhood. In a display of misplaced testosterone, he comes barreling through a hole in a wall with a chainsaw growling in his hands. When asked what his up to he utters, “oh, just adding on a room or two.” When asked by another male character if he’s going to wire the room with 220, and Keaton answers; “220, 221, whatever it takes.” I’m sure his next line would have been “shit, my wife’s gonna kill me”, but his was a movie, not real life.

Management at my store is famous for telling associates to that they need to step outside of their comfort zone (usually followed by the retort “What the hell did you do that for!!!?”), so I begrudgingly took on the assignment in the valley of death, commonly known as aisles 1 through 6 in electrical.

Fortunately, my first hundred or so customers where even more clueless about how electricity works than a young Ben Franklin. I easily cruised through my first four hours by using a trick I have turned into an art form over my long retail career. I simply avoided answering questions by employing deflection.

To unarm a customer with difficult questions, you simply start asking them different questions that they can’t possibly answer. It’s a type of verbal judo where you use the customer’s inquiry against them, until they just give up trying to buy anything and go home to gather more information.

I had one customer who asked early in my shift for an outside light bulb that came with those tiny little bases known as candelabra. He complained that the bulbs he had been using burnt out in less than a month. He wanted to know if we had any special candelabra bulbs that could be used outside. This was a question I was unable to answer.

To deflect, I asked him if the problem might be caused by a damaged weatherproof seal in the fixture. I asked if he knew of any damage to the weatherproof covering. He said he didn’t know, but that he would go home and check it out.

See, problem solved.

I have no idea if there is such a thing as an outdoor candelabra bulb, and I couldn’t find any on the shelf, so I simply deflected the question with another question. He later returned to the store and bought an entirely new light fixture which we both assumed would have the weatherproof seal in tact. The store saw a $4.99 light bulb sale increase to a $69.00 fixture sale and the customer thinks I know what I’m talking about.

Everybody wins.

Another customer asked me to help him find “Can Lights”. I don’t know a can light from a barrel light so I simply walked him around the department until he pointed out the can lights to me. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my store carries about 50 ,000 different configurations of what, to the untrained eye, looks like a simple hole in the ceiling with a light bulb screwed into it.

Can lights (as I found out by quickly and secretly scanning a shelf full of stuff I didn’t even know existed) come in a bewildering number of sizes, each with an equally overwhelming number of ways that they can be secured to the area above your head. They come in 4, 5, and 6 inch diameters with all sorts of wires sticking out of them and different heavy metal brackets to hold them up. Each has a specific function and is designed for a specific type of instillation environment. This was my salvation.

I am completely ignorant about which type goes where, but the customer doesn’t know that. He then asks; “which can light do I need?” I don’t know the answer to that question, but do I reveal my ignorance? Not on your life! I simply deflect. “What size of light were you thinking about using?” I say while pointing out the 4, 5 and 6 inch choices. “I don’t know”, he replies.

I then go in for the kill. “Well, how big is the room and what types of activities are you planning for it? The size of the can light depends on the square footage your trying to light and the height of the ceiling.”

My bet is that the customer has no clue as to the square footage and even if he does have some idea about the room’s basic dimensions, he certainly can’t calculate the cube footage, which is why I threw in the factoid about the ceiling height. ”I better go home and measure”, he says dejectedly. HI-YA!! verbal karate chop to the solar plexus.

I spend the rest of the day putting returned items back onto the shelf. I am struck by the shear number of items that come back to the electrical department. I was sure that plumbing saw the most returned items as customers find out that there is a big difference between ¾ and ½ inch pipe and spouses weren’t happy with the $45 plastic kitchen faucet that the husband bought (“What’s wrong with it? All the damn thing has to do is turn the water off, why do you need to spend $435?”). Electrical gives plumbing a real run for the money. I put back ceiling fans, switches, breakers, and a whole host of things that I could not identify.

The most returned item by far, however was light bulbs. People simply have no idea what size or type of bulb they need. They think they know, then they come in the front door and see the enormous array of bulbs we have in the store. The light bulb section consumes an area half the size of the department. It is eight feet high, runs for 55 feet in length and contains at least 35,000 separate items. Not multiple packs of items mind you but 30,000 different devices to give off light. When seen from space, I’m sure the light bulb aisle in my store is hard to discern from the great wall of China.

They keep the light bulbs near the front of the store, not to make it easier for the customers to find, but to improve the reception on their cell phones as they desperately call home to find out exactly what type of bulb they need. The shear size of the section, combined with the overwhelming number of ways you can make a wrong decision, drives many customers to madness. Most don’t even try to navigate this part of the store with out guidance, and today that meant walking through the shadows of doom that are light bulbs with me.

All the information most customers need to make the right choices are directly in front of them, or more accurately, right there in their own two hands. While some customers will venture into our “Light Bulb Jungle” unarmed and to their peril, most will bring in an example of what they need in the form of a recently burned out bulb.

All I have to do, as the helpful associate, is to take the bulb from their hands and begin reading the boxes on the shelf. I look for anything that bears a resemblance to the bulb I’m carrying and see if the numbers and descriptions on the box match what’s printed somewhere on the bulb. That gets me 95% home. Then it’s up to the customer do decide if they want soft white light, natural light, spot light, 30 par light, 20 par light, grow light, fish-tank light, incandescent light, florescent light, halogen light, cool white light or one of those yellow lights that don’t attract bugs. See, that isn’t so hard, is it?

While in light bulbs, I get to pontificate on one of my favorite topics, the idiocy of using the new compact florescent lights to help save the environment.

The theory goes that compact florescent lights, commonly referred to as CFL’s, help the environment by reducing energy usage. CFL’s are much more efficient than regular incandescent lights because they put out more light while using only a third of the electricity. You save both money and the planet by lowering your electric bill and the saved electricity leads to lower carbon emissions. I have no problem with that because as near as I can tell, the facts on energy savings, when comparing CFL’s to their incandescent counterparts, seem indisputable. Where the argument runs off the rails is in the whole “Good for the Environment” logic.

I’m a big believer that our use of fossil fuels like petroleum and coal are doing some strange things to the environment. I sitting here in Charleston South Carolina and it’s snowing, something it hasn’t done since 1895. So don’t tell me that driving SUV’s to the corner store and Hummer’s to the kids’ school is not putting the whole planet into some kind of climate catastrophe. But you have to look at things in a greater context. I can’t imagine that using more energy efficient light bulbs is going to make up for my neighbors truck that gets 1.7 mile to the gallon. I have to believe that we need to do more than convert to CFL’s if we’re going to stop global Armageddon.

To further vent my spleen, CFL’s have a big draw back as far as environmental friendliness is concerned…you can’t throw them away!

Check out the package for any CFL, you’ll see that you have to take them to an authorized disposal site. That’s not a characteristic generally attributed to a product that’s supposed to be a pal to the environment. CFL’s contain trace amounts of mercury, one of the most highly toxic substances on the planet. Mercury, once released into the ground or water, never goes away, and it causes sever brain damage to small children. Now the Mercury in one bulb is not going to turn your kid into a vegetable, but once 20 or so Billion of them get into land fills, I think we’re going to have a hard time feeling good about our selves when a future generations ask us what the hell we were thinking.

To expand on the Green-washing, CFL’s work because they are filled with a gas that glows when an electrical current passes through it. Those gases are known carcinogens, something you definitely don’t think of as earth friendly. Packaging also carries warnings that if a CFL breaks, you are not supposed to clean it up right away. You are supposed to leave the room after opening all the windows to change out the now toxic air. Once the room is ventilated, you are supposed to clean up what’s left of your green lighting and take the broken pieces to a hazardous waste disposal area. Green my ass!!

People are flocking into my store to buy these things and they are confused about them. CFL’s have only been widely available as a replacement for incandescents for about five years. Since many of the customers that come into my store are still vigorously debating the virtues of VHS vs. Betamax, it will be quite some time before they are aware of the choices they have in home lighting options. So when faced with a decision they are totally ill equipped to make, people will ask the man in the nametag for his opinion.

They are surprised when I tell them that I don’t really like CFL’s. They look at me with shocked disbelief and ask me why. It‘s then I tell them that I don’t usually like to buy disposable products that I can’t throw away.

They look at me, then they look at the pretty pictures of a pristine forest shown on the package for a CFL and they are even more confused. “But I thought CFL’s were good for the environment?” They ask. “They are”, I tell them, “just so long as you don’t ever plan to throw them away.” Then I show them the statement on the package and they have a tough time processing how a purchase that is supposed to save the planet can be so damaging to it that you can’t throw them away without irreversibly poisoning your drinking water.

I’d like to say that I was able to use my time in the electrical department to champion the cause of saving the planet, but unfortunately, most of the customers who asked my advice disregarded it and bought the CFL’s anyway. In a typical fashion, the associate is seen as the expert on whatever the customer wants to buy until he tells them the truth. They aren’t about to let some guy with a name tag ruin the sense of self satisfaction they were planning on having by purchasing a light bulb that’s good for the planet. Even if it ultimately leads to making the place we call home just a little bit more toxic for future generations

I’m only an expert on what I sell if I agree with a customer who has already told me that they don’t know what they are talking about. Go figure. Most customers would rather live in their ignorance and take the energy saving, planet saving until you don’t need it any more product that contributes to brain damage in children, and carry it home to their 3,500 square foot Mc Mansion in their 2.3 mile per gallon Escalade; warm in the fact that their purchase almost saved the planet… and that guy in electrical was a putz.

The shocking truth about "standard" replacement parts

I’m about to let you in on a little known fact about home improvement by peeling back a little of the veneer of ignorance that shrouds the majority of Do It Yourself projects. If you find what I’m about to tell you to be too great a challenge to your current belief system, I’m sorry, but it is better that you hear it from me than from some strange contractor out in the street.

There is no such animal as a standard or universal replacement part.

No matter what you have been lead to believe, no matter what you may read on the package, nothing fits in every situation, every time. Now I realize that I may just have put both your belief system and my own personal safety in jeopardy, but it’s a risk I feel I have to take.

I can no longer stand idly by while millions of self-described handy men and women march through home improvement warehouses, small hardware stores and huge lumber yards basing their misplaced sense of self confidence on the fact that since the packaging, the website or the guy in the vest told you that all you need is a “standard” replacement part: then they should have no problem making the repairs themselves.

I’m sure that right now, goons hired by the companies that make trillions of dollars selling “universal” replacement this or that’s are conspiring to make sure I accidentally fall over a cliff or meet an untimely death due to a short circuited pallet jack in the store, but the truth must come out.

Nothing in home improvement is ever universal or standard. Granted, there are parts that will work most of the time, or usually, or even in 80% of cases, but nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing will work all of the time. If truth were a part of advertising, then all of the packaging that uses the terms “standard” or “universal” would substitute truthful terms like “probably” or “usually”, but words like that don’t sell.

This concept of “Standard” is so ingrained in the imagination of so many of my customers that I can’t convince them otherwise. I had one gentleman come into the store with what appeared to be his wife and his mother. It was a Sunday and I assumed that the family was just making their way home from church. The wife asked me if we had replacement toilet tanks. This is a common allusion. Even though every single toilet tank you have ever seen standing proudly above it’s bowl looks exactly like every other tank, there are subtle difference in the ways they are manufactured that assures that only specific tanks will work on specific bowls. It makes no sense unless you are in the business of selling toilets.

If a toilet didn’t break, then no one would ever buy another one. So the manufactures assure themselves a regular, tidy profit by making each tank and bowl distinct enough to require that you buy the complete package if you break any of the parts.

This line of thinking is not unique to toilet manufactures, but is a key component of product development in the entire home building industry. Nothing can ever be easily fixed. Universal replacement parts are the holy grail of the industry. Everybody is looking for them, but nobody can ever find them and somehow the legend of their existence will not die.

The perfect design, from a manufacturer’s point of view, will insure that the cost of manufacturer specific replacement parts exactly equals 300% of the cost of simply replacing the whole thing. By making their products minutely unique, they protect themselves from having future business siphoned away by those goon hiring unscrupulous vendors who peddle untruthfully marked “Universal” replacement parts.

But back to the gentlemen with his wife and mother. I explained, as clearly and as simply as I could, that there was no such thing as a universal replacement tank. I offered to order the exact tank they needed as a replacement part if they could give me some information on the model of toilet they had. The gentleman then told me, in an exasperated tone, that all he needed was a “standard” toilet tank. “Ahh…” I thought, “If only that were somehow possible”

I again re-iterated the fact that there are no “standard” tanks and that I doubted very much that anything I sold would work on his toilet which he informed me was; “only about 6 years old”. Six years might as well be a lifetime given the rapidity with which manufacturers abandoned design, and I knew he was in for a frustrating Sunday afternoon.

When the truth of my revelation failed to mesh with his delusion, he turned in a huff and told his wife and mother that; ”He doesn’t know what the f*** he’s talking about!” I ignored his profanity, relishing the situation that I knew would arise in the next two hours.

Like clockwork, the profane gentleman wandered back into my department before the end of my shift asking me to help him find a replacement toilet. I immediately sold him the most overpriced, worst performing toilet that we had in the store. He never acknowledged that I did know what the f*** I was talking about, but that’s ok. At retail, we’ll take your money over an apology any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.