Store POS System Blog

Doing Things His Way

I was talking to the owner of an auto parts store the other day. His store is in a town of about 5,000 and is very profitable. He remains profitable because he is constantly changing his business to deal with the changes from his competition. In the same town was a store owned by one of the large program groups. The program group corporation took over the store a few years ago from some partners that couldn't make a go of it. A few years later the corporate store closed. I must assume that the store was not making money for or the corporation would have kept it open. After the corporation closed the store, representatives of the same corporation contacted the owner of the profitable store. These representatives tried to convince the store owner to take over the failed store or to convert his profitable store into their program group.The whole idea is insane. Twice people have tried to make money running a store the way that the program group says to run a store and both times they failed. Now they are asking somebody who is making money doing things his way to change and do things their way. That means that will tell him that he must spend an incredible amount of money on one of their signs boosting their business image. They will tell him what parts that he must buy and what items that he can't sell. The will tell him how to lay out his store. They will offer him many add on options from the corporate plan all of which cost big bucks. They will force him to buy their store POS system which makes it easier for them to control his business. Every one of these things that he must do limits his ability to make more money. To be fair, for every store owner that does things his way and prospers there are more that fail and they usually fail quickly.

Labels: changing a business, doing things his way, insane decisions, Program group, Store POS System

posted by MIB @ 9:38 AM

Hard to Reconcile

I had a conversation a while back with a representative of a large automotive program group. He was clearly a company man through and through. After our conversation was over, it was hard for me to reconcile some things that he said. I know of a few stores that had sold their stores to this program group over the years. The people that sold to this corporation told us that these corporate stores added more inventory and installed the latest and greatest store pos systems from the corporation. Also, it turned out that in each case the sales at these stores had dropped dramatically. I asked the representative if this was typical. He assured me that this was typical. He went on to say that the corporation would prefer to have another individual buy and run the store. He then said that what with the parts business like it is, there was little chance that somebody would want to buy a parts store. From what he said, it seems that a mega-corporation with unlimited cash, vast managerial skills and superb marketing skills can't find, train and retain managers that can run a parts store nearly as well as an owner. In other words these corporations don't know how to run individual stores well. However, these same corporations continue to try to convince the owners of affiliated stores to run their stores the same way that the corporations run their stores. Einstein once said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." Either this corporation does not care if their affiliated store succeed or their management fits the definition of insanity. It seems to me that if the corporation wanted their affiliated stores to succeed, they would make it as easy as possible for the owners of the affiliated stores to run their stores however they want.

Labels: insanity, Program group, Store POS System

posted by MIB @ 9:39 AM