Imagine you are in your store and the phone rings. The voice on the other end of the line says, “Hello, I’m standing in the store at the probiotics cooler and I don’t know which one to buy.” Of course, you accept without much surprise the fact that people are...
Here’s a universal: a shopper walks into an independent natural products retail store and asks for health information, which the nutritionist willingly provides in a 20-minute conversation. As the conversation wraps up, said shopper pops open a price-comparison app on his or her smartphone to check prices elsewhere. How rude!...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The History of Rudeness At first, it wasn’t online websites that were stealing your brick-and-mortar customers; it was the vitamin discount shop down the street. Where are those discounters today? For the most part, gone. A straight hard-discount vitamin strategy inside of four walls turned out to be an unsustainable...
What were your sales results for 2016? Overall, according to the just-released Retail Insights’ Retail Universe for Premium Natural, Organic Food, Supplement and Personal Care Sales (see WholeFoods Magazine, January 2017, page 26), total natural products industry sales increased by $2.78 billion, rising 3.8%, to $75.2 billion. Supernaturals including Austin,...
Total natural organic sales climbed $2.78 billion in 2016, or 3.8 percent, to $75.2 billion from $72.4 billion, and now account for 11.56 percent of total food store sales of $650.5 billion. The average store sells $670,210 in natural products per year, up 3.3 percent from $648,574 a year ago,...
I squeaked through the public elementary and high school system during a time when it was still socially and culturally acceptable to win—and to lose—competitions like footraces, softball games, rope climbing, and spelling bees. Teachers still graded papers with embarrassingly bright red markers, highlighting areas needing improvement. At the time,...
When the Baby Boom generation was born, between 1946 and 1964, those of ethnic background made up 28% of the U.S. population. By 1997, the first birth year for Gen Z, nearly half the country (47%) was of ethnic origin: Asian, Hispanic, multi-ethnic. Shortly, the United States will become a...
With the Internet putting extreme pressure on the way you’ve always done business, it’s easy to feel helpless. First, take a moment to console yourself that you are not alone. Virtually every business in every industry has had to rethink and restructure its business model to continue to compete in...
Not all retail stores are under pressure. One new chain is expanding. Based on a successful formula, the chain plans to add 100 new 10,000-square-foot stores this year for a total of more than 970 units. The stores are called “Ulta Beauty” (Ulta, not Ultra, notice) and offer makeup, skin...
People of a certain age will remember The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, a now-classic 1966 Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western where good-guy gunslinger Eastwood teams up with a bad guy gunslinger to find a buried cache of stolen Confederate gold during the American Civil War. The messy plot, with...
