Building Your “Department
Store” Downtown
Two Rivers
Main Street has hired noted retail consultant Ed Wendland
to work with our downtown stores. The goal of this project
is a simple one: BUILD BUSINESS!
With over 40 years experience in the retail business, Ed
Wendland has seen a lot of success, and more importantly
made a lot of mistakes. According to Ed “you really learn
more from your mistakes than your triumphs. Mistakes force
you to look at your whole program, to carefully analyze
each step and draw the tough conclusion of just where the
program went awry.”
The face of retail business is ever changing and in many
ways, trends in retail are cyclical. With this in mind one
can see a definite trend in retail trade emerging over the
last decade in the United States. First, malls all over the
country are in trouble. Shoppers habits have changed.
Specifically, shoppers are increasingly unwilling to devote
the time to park and wander through a mall. In many urban
and suburban areas malls are viewed as unsafe. This has led
to the development of the so called “big box” stores as the
new paradigm for big retailers.
Shoppers habits have shifted towards single item purchases.
Destination and ease of entry and egress are more important
factors in people/s shopping decisions. The proliferation
of malls and big box stores has had a homogenizing effect
on retail. There is nothing different anywhere you shop.
Anywhere that is, except downtown.
So what is a downtown to do to survive? Well, we can’t rely
upon the unique nature of necessary for survival. Rather we
need to develop a comprehensive plan to circulate the
customers (traffic) which we already have downtown from
shop to shop and store to store. People are the key.
Two Rivers already has the people coming downtown, but we
don’t use them well. This is partly because of distance
between stores and the location of Central Park being in
the center of our retail district. As a retail center, we
need to become better at moving people around the downtown
with out requiring people to walk from store to store.
The fact that the retail giants in the US are acutely aware
of changes in peoples shopping habits is readily apparent.
The big stores are all trying to tie up the necessities
market and use those product lines in part as lures or loss
leaders to get the customer in the door. Thereby
recognizing the single purchase
nature of the modern consumer. The other facet of this is
the trend in malls to offer the customer a way to drive up
to the biggest anchors and second tier stores, park and
walk in to that store -- bypassing the mall entirely if you
wish!
It’s Ed’s goal to use these very same tactics to keep the
customers downtown. By developing retail partners downtown
and rotating which stores cross market with each other he
hopes to increase traffic across all stores. “We already
have the stores selling the shop they’re in to another
store.” Says Ed. This is the essence of cross marketing.
The cross marketing will be monitored by volunteer block or
cluster captains who will be working closely with the Main
Street staff to fine tune the program.
Now keep in mind that this is only the briefest of synopsis
of the entire program. We are working Ed hard! There are
many more parts to his program and work and that’s too much
detail to go into in a newsletter. If you like what you’ve
read here then please get involved. It is only by working
together that we can offer the customer a reason to shop
downtown!