![\"\"](\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/8\/87\/Razor_old_a.jpg\/220px-Razor_old_a.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
When I worked for Longs, store managers were trained to be entrepreneurs and to look for items that could be successful in our stores. \u00a0We 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.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0 \u00a0Sometimes 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.<\/p>\n
And then there was the Razor Scooter. \u00a0Around 2000, one of the managers in our district went to Hawaii and saw a lot of kids using these crazy scooters. \u00a0He thought, “I wonder if they’d sell in our stores, since they’re so popular here.” \u00a0He came back and located the vendor and brought the item to one of our district meetings. \u00a0 The scooter cost around $50 and he said they could sell at $99. \u00a0 Now there were a bunch of managers in the room who thought “A scooter in a drug store? \u00a0$99? \u00a0 Who’s going to buy that?” \u00a0but we all decided to humor him and order a case of 6.<\/p>\n
The rest is history. \u00a0 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, \u00a0and we were raking in the sales. \u00a0 At the peak my store was selling over 100 a week, which is $10,000 in sales on JUST ONE ITEM. \u00a0That was close to 10% of my entire front store sales. \u00a0And the best part was we were making 50% profit on the item, which was unheard of at the time. \u00a0Other 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. \u00a0The following year they actually had to adjust our budgets because they knew we wouldn’t have the $10,000\/week extra sales.<\/p>\n
So basically, because we were trained to think outside the box\u00a0(not as executors\/robots) and thought of our stores as our own, just one idea from one manager made the company millions of dollars. \u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
More on the Razor scooter here.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I worked for Longs, store managers were trained to be entrepreneurs and to look for items that could be successful in our stores. \u00a0We 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 Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retail-trends"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":716,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715\/revisions\/716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}