Easter trading

Easter, and what's most visible on the news radar? The same 'impoverished' retailers who, every year, fight the law about not being allowed to trade on Easter Sunday or on Good Friday. Yesterday, on the news, we had a bunch of them boasting at how clever they were to do what they were doing. One stood there saying: I didn't ask any of the staff to come into work; I didn't make these customers come out and buy stuff.
And, yes, his shop was full (it was one of the Odering's garden shops) as was the Real Groovy shop (in Auckland, I think) that was shown.
But how essential was it for these places to be open? Not in the least essential. These shops are open because retailers - some retailers - have got to the point where they can't bear to be closed, in case they lose a few hundred dollars. It's plain greed, and has nothing to do with serving the customers, who would quite happily find something else to do if the shop wasn't open. (Probably something healthier.)
People do not die of retail deprivation. In spite of the notion that 'retail therapy' is supposed to be good for you, no demise on the planet has yet been attributed to a category - cause of death: 'could not shop.'
Nehemiah, in the Book of the same name, shut the city gates on the traders who insisted on coming into the city on the Sabbath, and cleared them off the city walls. No doubt there were Jews in the city then who said: but we can't do without shopping on the Sabbath! Nehemiah proved they could. Perhaps it's time for those who deal with recalcitrant retailers to do more than just charge them a nominal fine.

Leather

While we were in Barcelona, my wife came across a hobby shop in the next street to where we were staying (a street that also had two rival Internet shops, incidentally, both of them run by Indians - Indians from India, that is) which sold leather for use in decoration. Like so many shops in the area it had a tiny frontage, and inside the counter stretched from just by the door to near the back. All along the right wall were little shelves and lockers, and along the left wall were reels and reels of leather in various grades of width and texture.
It immediately became my wife's favourite shop in Barcelona, and she went in there at least three times in the three days we stayed in the city. The place was constantly busy all day - and by all day I mean from the time it opened in the morning (around nine) to the time it shut in the evening (around nine). Some Spanish shops have a siesta; this one didn’t as far as we could tell.
Even though we are already loaded up fairly heavily in terms of what we have to carry around Europe, she bought some leather to use for knots, and perhaps later, to hang the enamel pendants we intend making on.
The Barcelona people obviously use the leather for all sorts of decorations: on purses, and clothing and whatever. You might wonder how such a shop could survive, but it’s obviously been there for decades - maybe more than a century.

Marketing without Money

When I ran OC Books, one of the biggest issues I used to find with direct marketing, was getting the suppliers to back you up with stock. Because we often advertised books that were a little off the mainstream of Christian publishing, the suppliers shook in their shoes – or so it seemed – at the thought of holding more than a few copies of the titles we wanted to promote. Yet they knew that almost invariably, if I ordered books for our email direct marketing, we would usually do quite well with them.
Who can blame them? And who am I to preach on marketing, direct, indirect or out in left field?
While I was managing the shop I sometimes felt as though I’d read every book on marketing there is to read. I hadn’t, of course, since books on marketing are like weeds: the more you read them, the more there are to read. But I did learn a few things over the years, and put a lot of the things I learnt into practice. The actual approaches worked; it was just having enough money to take the approaches that was the issue.
We tried everything: different signage, giving away things, radio advertising (a real fizzer – for us, anyway – and expensive). Of course we tried direct marketing, which turned into email marketing as time went on, and that was pretty successful overall. We just needed more customers – and getting those was always the biggest issue, since there were several other Christian bookshops similar to ours that were fighting for the same few people.
We got ourselves in the newspapers several times, for free…and I still shudder at some of the pictures the reporters published alongside their articles. It seemed as though we were fated to have awful pictures sitting next to the text. There was one in particular which embarrasses me to this day, of a couple leaning over the counter, she wearing some long pink knitted thing that became the sole source of attention in the photo. The fact that the interior of our shop was in the background was neither here nor there.
I even contemplated tv advertising once, since Channel 9 here in Dunedin was offering it at a reasonable rate. And I do mean reasonable. I’d never considered telly ads before, but this was certainly tempting. But I was rather put off (apart from, as usual, having too little cash to spare) by the awful ad they did for the University Bookshop, which seemed to have nothing to do with books, had a strange sexual component, and must have been aimed at weirdo bookreaders. And anyway, did I really want an ad for OC Books appearing in the ad breaks for Cow TV?