Sunday, July 28, 2013

Why would buyers pay retail if everything

Sydney Monday 29 July, 2013. In Australia, it is the younger people who have adapted to the digital revolution. Teenagers instantly pick up on opportunities that are made possible by technology and entrepreneurs. They are quick to recognise opportunities like online gaming, travel guides and shopping online because it they are attractive options.We have a great selection of blown glass backyard solar landscape lights and Cheap Granite Countertops. Almost everything they need to buy is cheaper, requires little effort and does not need cash. 

For some people, the best part of online shopping is that they can see what the competition is offering without making a lot of phone calls or spending hours driving around from shop to shop.What is the future for retail shops? Are shopping mall tenants commercial dodos or dinosaurs struggling under the actual demise of their business model from cyber trade ?An example of the real and ongoing revolution in buying behaviour is footwear. 

Every local Westfield Mall has a shoe shop. There are also giant businesses like Target or a Kmart where the shoe department is much smaller but the stock is cheap. These retail giants have in house brands made cheaply in Asia while online stores like Surfstich have fashion brands that are also made in Asia with a huge range of sizes and colours. For price and range reasons, online footwear websites are destroying local shoe shops. 

The cost of buying and holding stock to match the online warehouse sites is too high for a local shoe retailer.The worlds most efficient and cost effective Cheap Bathroom Decoration Products? The more astute footwear buyer will watch online auction sites like GraysOnline or eBay and look for the shoes they want that are being sold on behalf of failed businesses with no reserve. For the price of one pair of shoes at the shopping mall they might get four pairs delivered at an online auction site ! 

Convenience stores get away with rip off prices for milk, cigarettes and chocolate because they are offering desperate last minute crave items but shoes, clothing, electronics or home wares are not cravings. Buyers want to save on everything. Poorer people have to and wealthy people insist on it.To a rational potential retailer or industry observer, the question is, "Why would anyone buy retail and pay full price?" 

The folly of paying too much for anything is not apparent to everyone just yet but older consumers are becoming more comfortable with iphones, ipads and laptops as their own personal checkout. Every new online buyer was yesterdays' retail store customer. It is not a fad. It is retail commercial reality. The evidence of the destruction of the retail industry by online marketing is visible in every small town, suburb or city where "For Rent" signs have appeared in windows that were once showing, clothing, shoes, typewriters or alarm clocks. 

There are winners in old retail because they have adapted to sell online and in person at large warehouses. They do both. They offer cheap fast turnover items like building materials, appliances and food that are all items required for immediate use, are too big to post or are too cheap to post. The postage would be more than the buying price. 

We are seeing the change in Australia. Harvey Norman run by Gerry Harvey and his wife started to complain last year about overseas online stores taking Australian money.. Their protests did not make the government change the rules so Harvey Norman joined the cyber trade march. Harvey Norman now does a lot of business online as a result. For such a polite, quiet and unassuming guy, Ames, who is the co-owner of Twin State Sand and Gravel Co. and Blaktop Inc., has been in the news a lot recently as the moving force behind some of the biggest developments in the Upper Valley, and that has opened up his business to much public speculation. 

In recent weeks, hes heard it on good authority that his Iron A China Stone Carving concept that would double as a quick charge station for gadgets.Horse Park development will be the future home of a Target store or a Lowes or some other giant retailer, or that hes selling his business to rival Pike Industries, or that hes shutting down all together.I just laugh, Ames said last week. Ive even had people come up to me and say they heard it from a reliable source that so-and-so is moving in. I tell them that Im the property owner, and I dont even know who it is. 

Ames and his partner, Stuart Close, are in the final stages of negotiation with a developer to buy Iron Horse Park a 92-acre mixed use development in West Lebanon that has been approved for a 150,000-square-foot retail box store. The developer will provide the anchor tenant. 

Though Ames is not saying who the developer is either Ill let him make that public his identity may be known by September when he appears before the Lebanon Planning Board to request two minor changes to the two office lots in the Iron Horse Park site plan. The approved plan also has two large retail lots, two small restaurant sites and four industrial lots. 

If he gets Planning Board approval, then I think well close by the end of the year, and hell probably start construction next year. 

To make room for the new development, Ames plans to move his business headquarters to the lot next door, which had been a Carroll Concrete plant. (Carroll consolidated its operation at its Plainfield Road plant.) In August, the Twin State office staff will work out of temporary quarters until the current building can be picked up and moved to a new foundation on the adjacent lot. After remodeling is completed in November, the staff will return to the building. 

As far as selling the business, that was never considered. And Pike, a long-time rival of Twin State now owned by the Dublin, Ireland-based Old Castle Materials, would not be a candidate, Ames said. 

The West Lebanon site hasnt been a viable primary source for material for some time, and about 10 years ago a decision was made to find another use for the land, which had been operating as a gravel pit since 1927. The Iron Horse development is the result of that process, which took more than five years. Final city approval was granted this spring.Ames and Close also have benefitted from the foresight of their predecessors Tom Close, Stuarts.father, and Bill Taylor, Ames grandfather who started the company in 1947 to provide the aggregate material needed to build the Wilder Dam. 

The founders had the business sense to realize, in the 1960s, that the West Lebanon site was closing in on its useful life as a primary stone source, and they purchased a large tract of land along the Connecticut River in North Hartland. That site is the future of the company, Ames said.
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