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Socialist policies destroy yet another small business
2012-03-30 16:01:48
edited 2012-03-30 16:01:48 in Politics
I clench my fists and yell "anime" towards an uncaring, absent God, and swear solemnly to press my thumbs into Chocolate America's eyeballs until he is blinded, to directly emasculate sporting figures, to beat the shit out of tumblr users with baseball bats, and to quietly appreciate what Waylon Smithers being gay means to me.
Comments
Eh, most small bookstores doom themselves, either by simply not having the selection to compete with mega chains like Barnes and Noble or Amazon, or intentionally limiting themselves to whatever things the owner likes and considers proper books.
Yeah, I had a thread awhile back about my experience with seeing a lot of small businesses start up and fail. Almost invariably, it's because the owner didn't look into what such a business needs to do to succeed.
I mean small businesses can be successful if they tap into a small dedicated consumer base who don't have more common alternatives for the things they want. Like the local comic or gaming shops or even some sports shops like archery shops, they can stay afloat because they hit that dedicated market without picking something you can easily pick up from a bigger store(or at least do so and get the selection you want).
I worked for a small time bookshop and to be honest, their business model was okay but the books they got were old books or books people didnt want
The examples in my neighborhood tended to be restaurants that didn't have enough tables that it was possible to turn a profit. And this one toy store that rented out a huge space but was selling really cheap products at tiny profit margins, so it wasn't cancelling out the cost of the location.
Thing is if they don't sell cheap products at tiny profit margins, they don't make sales at all.
As for bookstores, there's basically no way a corner shop will magically have a competitively large enough selection to compete with Barnes & Noble. They don't have the floor space or resources to even come close to that.
The only two small-time bookstores I can think of that are sticking up well are a Christian bookstore near my home, and a bookstore right next to the University of Oregon campus that makes most of its profit from used textbooks and course literature. Both exploit specific niche audiences.
Not true. The small business next to them, a wedding dress shop, is doing excellently, because it's not attempting to make a profit selling cheap things at tiny profit margins.
What I would have done, had I run the toy store, is offer some sort of "photograph your kid" service in the store. That's something that has a more or less arbitrary price, a decent demand, and is pretty much all profit. It wouldn't be something people necessarily went to the store for, but it wouldn't be too hard a sell, I think, once they're already there. And they had a pretty excellent number of customers, so even if you assume the conversion rate to be tiny, it would have worked, I think.
Wedding dresses are about as specialized and niche an audience as it gets -- not exactly comparable to a general bookstore. Not to mention it's a profession unusually open to individual designers instead of middlemanning the same products as everyone else.
Most of my point was the latter bit.
They were, as best I could tell, selling toys at an excellent rate. But that didn't help because their business plan involved making less than a dollar of profit per sale. What they needed was some product that actually got them a profit, even if they weren't necessarily going to sell it to every customer. The role of the cheap toys should have been to get people in the door, not to provide the main source of income.
Has a big company ever tried to sneak into those areas under the guise of a start up business, having the profits then funneled back to them?
Icalasari - what's the point? The costs of the land would probably create a meager profit compared to what they could do with a bigger lot and more available products to sell to folks. That and they have online stores where they can just warehouse stuff and sell what they need to whoever.