When I worked for Longs, store managers were trained to be entrepreneurs and to look for items that could be successful in our stores.  We did have corporate buyers but they knew that they couldn’t see every vendor out there, and often there were local items that would do well in certain stores.

If you found something from a local vendor you’d share it with other stores, occasionally an item would catch on and our corporate office would catch notice and send it out for all 400+stores to look at.    Sometimes they were fad items that sold in only one area, but once in a while there would be a popular item that ended up on every store’s shelves.

And then there was the Razor Scooter.  Around 2000, one of the managers in our district went to Hawaii and saw a lot of kids using these crazy scooters.  He thought, “I wonder if they’d sell in our stores, since they’re so popular here.”  He came back and located the vendor and brought the item to one of our district meetings.   The scooter cost around $50 and he said they could sell at $99.   Now there were a bunch of managers in the room who thought “A scooter in a drug store?  $99?   Who’s going to buy that?”  but we all decided to humor him and order a case of 6.

The rest is history.   After the initial 6 sold out in my store in a couple days, I ordered 24 more, then 48 more, then 96 more and they continued to sell like the proverbial hotcakes. Word got around that Longs (and ONLY Longs!) had them,  and we were raking in the sales.   At the peak my store was selling over 100 a week, which is $10,000 in sales on JUST ONE ITEM.  That was close to 10% of my entire front store sales.  And the best part was we were making 50% profit on the item, which was unheard of at the time.  Other districts heard about it and eventually they were being sold in the whole chain and the sales for the company were over a million dollars. Eventually other chains noticed, they popped up in Sav-On, Walmart and everywhere else, cheap imitations came out and sales dropped away but it was quite a ride while it lasted.  The following year they actually had to adjust our budgets because they knew we wouldn’t have the $10,000/week extra sales.

So basically, because we were trained to think outside the box (not as executors/robots) and thought of our stores as our own, just one idea from one manager made the company millions of dollars.   Such a thing could never happen in today’s retail market but it showed why Longs was the king of the drug chains back in the day.

More on the Razor scooter here.