Show Me The Products!

Forget selling me your "environment," how about having some product around for me to buy? It certainly makes a dramatic statement to have a store with wide open flowing spaces and maybe a dozen shirts artfully hung at odd angles on a couple of rods around the perimeter, but I’m not impressed. Well, maybe I will be a bit impressed by how much margin and markup you have to have on those dozen shirts in order for the sale of even one of them to cover the cost of your rent and utilities. But I don’t think that that is the impression you are trying to make. Or maybe I’m just not your target customer, but I should be--I’m the guy with the money and plastic in his wallet, and the two daughters taking me in tow.

As I said, maybe I just don’t get the fashion statements that stores are trying to make with their minimal inventory and some outright bizarre mannequins showing their wares. Or do they just keep the good stuff in back and only trot it out when they have a live one in their environment? I don’t know. But I do know that after killing the weekend trying to spend some money on my daughters that I wasn’t really impressed with what I saw. For the record, the time was spent at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Ill., which--until Mall of the Americas was built in Minnesota--was the largest indoor mall in the country. And it still takes a full weekend to cover all of the stores. All of the big guys are there, along with a gazillion small shops, and yet it was hard to spend money there.

A few recent posts have cried out for seating and resting areas in stores, but I would like to cry out for more fixtures and product to look at. And maybe turn down the volume on the music blasting through the store. It may be nice for the employees, but as a customer trying to listen and make sense out of the daughters' talk it was very distracting. Not that I’m asking for elevator music, just a lower decibel rating.

Admittedly the big department stores had plentiful quantities of product, but it sure all looked the same to my tired old eyes. And it was not to my daughters' liking either. They did find things at the small boutique stores, but there wasn’t much to look at and not many had a full range of sizes to back up meager wares. Apparently some stores are opened to sell to one small niche of design and customers, but are they too narrowly focused? My girls did go to the mall specifically to find a couple of the small shops that they have liked in the past, but they were gone and replaced with new stores after only a few months.

Also for the record, the girls aren’t outrageously sized, but they are tall, razor-thin dancers. They are also a newly graduated elementary school teacher who was seeking a professional looking wardrobe to go with the new job, and the other is an education major looking for the same wardrobe to go do her student teaching in. It shouldn’t have been difficult, or am I just naïve about fashion retailing nowadays? There just didn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground between hopelessly out-of-date, and way-too-much-in-date.

So how about it folks, could we get a broader selection in your stores to sing your praises for you, and maybe turn down the volume so that I can hear the choir?

--Scott Caldwell, Guest Blogger

Comments

[hardliner]

Where are you, I'll come visit, with the daughters...

[Heather Long]

I love this blog and I completely agree with you. I was so sick of the idea of a boutiques being uptight, stuffy and with minimal offerings outrageous in price that I decided to open my own. People are so surprized when they walk in to find a comfortable store with tons of merch and affordable prices!