Two, three maybe four times a week, we find ourselves discussing on-line business as we visit your stores.  These conversations are beginning to show some evolution as more and more consumers “get their feet wet” with the experience.  One of the most interesting trends we see are the number of times the discussion turns to consumer dissatisfaction with their purchase(s), especially in certain product categories.  Buying airplane tickets, hotel rooms or printer cartridges on-line is quite different than buying furniture.  It obviously relates to the guesswork that goes into purchasing – especially seating – furniture that most on-line buyers never actually see before it arrives on their front step.  Stories about consumers completely rejecting a home furnishing product are beginning to proliferate, even when it means absorbing a significant financial loss.  Sofas, chairs, motion furniture are often very difficult for the average consumer to assess only by looking at a computer monitor.

Here is an interesting ad I ran across recently in Phoenix Home & Garden magazine. 

Just out of college, my first job was in a lighting showroom and we sold this brand of fixtures called Hinkley Lighting.  While I’ve been away from that industry for many years now, my guess is that this manufacturer opened some of their own stores offering just their product.  There are two very nice showrooms in the Phoenix area selling medium to upper end lighting fixtures.

Retail margins, at least when I was working in lighting, were (are) significantly higher than home furnishings, running a solid three times cost.  Buy it for $100, sell it for $300.  That kind of margin is easy to aggressively attack on-line.  I would speculate that for this reason, and because you don’t sit on a dining room chandelier, the residential lighting industry has suffered a much greater loss of brick and mortar retail volume than home furnishings.  So I found it quite interesting that this ad bluntly, proudly and profoundly puts forth a laundry list of reasons why buying on-line is not a good idea.  Much, if not most of these bullet points are applicable to our business as well. 

I suspect that there may be at least one or two here that most of us still haven’t thought of.  Add to these significant others that are equally worth keeping in mind.  A dealer we were visiting recently pointed out that they collect and dispose of tons of cardboard and packing materials every month as they deliver to their customers.  A consumer is faced with quite a chore trying to disposed of the cardboard from which they have just unpacked a 62″ china cabinet.

We hope you find scanning this ad as interesting as we did.  We have much to be proud of, and much working to our advantage, with stores loaded with goods for consumers to see, touch and try out.  Let’s press ahead!