On the way home from the Gift and Home Trade Association conference in New Orleans, I was looking for a magazine in the airport and discovered an article in Reader’s Digest by Michelle Crouch called ‘13 Things Your Salesclerk Won’t Tell You.’  Now chances are good that like me, you are a salesclerk, at least… Read More

The media has been talking so much about “Black Friday,” expanding it to “Black Weekend” and beyond.  This traditional launch of the Christmas shopping season occurs the day after Thanksgiving, and theoretically got its name from the fact that it is the day that is supposed to start putting you in the black for the… Read More

We first noticed text alerts, or mobile offers, while shopping in a Copenhagen department store a few years ago. The sign said that shoppers could find a special SMS offer on glassware using their mobile phone.  We didn’t even know at the time that “SMS” stands for short message service, and refers to text messages… Read More

Combining items in your store into pre-made sets can be a great way to give shoppers new gift ideas during the upcoming holiday season. And as you can see from this photo taken on a recent visit to Bennington Potters in Vermont, all it takes is a bit of ribbon or twine. Gifts sets also… Read More

Tag, You’re It    I often start out my seminars for retailers by asking participants to write a “tagline” or slogan describing their business. It should be ten words or less, and define makes your store unique. Taglines are more common in other fields of endeavor such as automakers (Ford: Built for the Road Ahead and… Read More

It’s been said that in music, the rests are as important as the notes.  The silence sets off the sound that precedes and follows the pause, giving it more importance.  While you wouldn’t want too many rests (I found a link to a list of 20 compositions made up of silence, which seems a bit… Read More

We all hope that we never have to face a medical crisis in our business, but of course things do sometimes happen.  Beyond keeping a supply of bandaids on hand, what have you done to make sure you’re prepared in case something happens to a customer, or one of your employees? It is a good… Read More

One of our employee’s favorite benefits is discovering treasures in the store’s “free box.”  As the name implies, they can help themselves to anything they want there, at no charge.  And although the free box isn’t really magic, it does seem to refill itself with very little effort.  What goes in the free box?  Mostly… Read More

Customers love choices, at least we assume they do. But there is a fine line between offering lots of options and inducing what brothers Chip and Dan Heath refer to as decision paralysis.  In their recent book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, they describe an experiment that takes place in a… Read More

A new source of funds: social lending Does your small business need money for inventory, growth, or unexpectedly expenses?  If so, you may have tried to get a bank loan without success.  Today’s economy has made traditional loan sources increasingly difficult to find, leading many shopkeepers to use high-interest credit cards as a last-ditch source… Read More