In your line of work, buying certain types of products seems as important as selling them. Can you tell me how you go about choosing the products that you sell and why? On the units themselves, it's honestly pretty rigorous in that we feel like we really have to sell if not capital T, capital B, "The Best" because maybe one of my lines is, people say, "What's the best vacuum?" I try to be sincere when I say, "Well, what's the best car?" If you're a farmer, it might be a pickup truck but if you're driving for kids to school maybe not so much. So, I'm not sure that there is a capital T capital B, the best vacuum machine manufacturer, I'm not sure there's the same thing for a sewing machine manufacturer. But there are definitely high-quality ones and non high-quality ones. Because we are very far from having an infinite money supply for inventory to decide to go with one line over the other, there have to be compelling reasons. Now, most of that has happened way in the past. When we introduce a new product, we picked up the world's first bionic floor mop and not the cheap 79 thing they called a bionic mop. It was the product of the year two years ago and it's a higher price point honestly but it's just well made. Is the company going to be here 10 years from now? I don't know. But it is a nifty product that is very well made. Things like that that we bring in on a case by case basis because this wasn't a whole, this is a product. If you are totally wrong, you are not out a tremendous amount of money. On smaller products, what I'll call the niche things, that's almost totally from the show. It's almost counter sale kinds of things. Usually, what I think is really nifty and that it's going to be an easy selling people and I'm almost always wrong. So, we try something out and we get initial order in, and when we still have half of the order two years later, I go, "Well, we didn't lose money because a lot of those things have huge margins." I don't want to say that by no means arbitrary because you're still choosing out of hundreds of products, but I don't want hundreds of products in the store because I don't want to deal with dozens of different vendors. So, you look at what you think is going to be nifty and hit your customer's price point. Two years ago, I finally got one right and we sold a ton of it, except for one disaster where we got in all these chemicals back in the early 90's, where I thought that we would be more of a cleaning company and we would have all these different, almost like a hardware store or how Kroger if you go down there cleaning supply aisles and they have all the different products. That didn't work out so well but the biggest thing on any product that we sell is the quality of the product, that is honestly prior to price point. If it's quality, they're still going to be a market for that, it just might not be a big enough market that you can really be successful with that product. But you're not going to lose. If it's a good product, you'll sell enough of them that'll be justifiable on some level. That's the primary thing. Price is definitely a huge tiebreaker if there are two companies that have very similar quality. The thing that I think a lot of people overlook that is a big secondary factor is just how easy the company is to deal with. Once we get a product in, like over time, we're still very happy with the product. It hasn't gone down at all but as a company, it's a very large privately owned thing that is now in the third generation. Honestly, the grandkids just are not running the thing as smoothly as dad was. So honestly, our sales with that company have suffered because on almost every level, they've been harder to deal with. The only thing that's been easy, I mean as far as, just issues and I'm not talking about credit issues, billing issues. The thing that you think normally is the primary sticking point in business, that's the one thing that's, it was okay then it's okay now. It's everything else from the shipping department to the parts, the knowledge of the salespeople, everything else. So, that is honestly quite the consideration if we're thinking about getting a whole new line in, is just whether or not the company is going to be worth dealing with. Because usually, there's going to be something of ballpark equality for ballpark price and so that's a, I don't want to say tiebreaker, but it can disqualify companies. If they are just a pain to work with, then it would have to be extraordinary in some other sense for me to want to mess with them. You see this and it's one of the reasons why we don't see the reps in person anymore, that bean counters are making decisions that end up being really bad business decisions even though they're good bean counting decisions. With this company, they tried to streamline, cut this, cut that, cut that until the point where there's no company left really. Again, the stuff that should be smooth, stuff that was always smooth is just, nightmarish is hyperbolic but it's really and it's a constant issue because we're still dealing with these guys every freaking week. It's just that the orders are getting smaller and smaller. The hell, just our store alone was paying fo, r if you multiply that by however many of us there are still left across the country, it was not a good business decision that they made. I think a lot of people in this industry aren't as flexible or as easily pissed off as I am, but they might have been more hardwired into this company than we were as a business. But just to add to national show, talking to a lot of dealers because they were presence in the industry. It's not my impression, it is just simply a fact. It's pretty much on the front. They consider apparently because the bean counters are looking at your manufacturer, what's your cost of sales, let's get that down. However, they can get that down and they really haven't sacrificed a product yet, and in some ways they have but it's been pretty small and it really hasn't affected the overall quality, and I'm not sure that they've had choices. I'm not running the company. It could have been vendor issues, it could have been whatever. But, it's all these other costs where consolidating phone lines. Whatever you could be saving is being lost if I dread calling you up to place an order because X percentage of the calls don't get transferred correctly, people don't pick up. It's a freaking phone line. I know they're not free but this this is a nine digit company. They can pay for a freaking phone line, that's not where you save. But all you can do is cost yourself and that's what they're doing. If you could change the way you budget for sales, what would you change? Would you move from paper to computer or are there certain things that you would do? It's a idiosyncrasy of mine and I'm personally more- It's not that I'm more comfortable, I simply just think better when I'm looking at papers and when I'm looking at a screen. With the store, a lot of it is plotting and scheming and it's something that I will do if I'm looking at numbers on a sheet of paper, I won't do if I'm looking at numbers on a screen, I just think of relationships and there are things that I'm curious about, like if we could just carry two or three models of sewing machine, how would that affect our sales? If I could without really jeopardizing the store's success, if I could have almost placebo store something that I could try things out and if it failed miserably it wouldn't negatively impact anything. But, as far as planning or projecting ahead, I'm not sure what I would do differently because I honestly spend a little less now, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about where I expect to be in six months, where I expect to be in a year, where I expect to be in three years through our various channels, I'm just not sure that my system is totally imperfect, it's far from perfect. But, I'm not sure that anything occurs to me that would be better for me to do. I think that the psychic pain of a new system and I really, I look at the numbers, I look at and relook at the numbers and eventually you internalize them and once you internalize them really doesn't matter what form they are in. You touched upon the customer that's changed, that was 60, now they are 70 and now they are on the internet. Do you think you'd do something more online or would that change anything? It's a, I am not, it's a missed opportunity for the store. We should be, I will not be spearheading that effort. However, many years ago I couldn't tell you when it started, but at a national show they were saying, "Hey, get on Facebook it, blah blah blah blah." I don't think conceptually I was really convinced that they were 100 percent right, I think just a little bit of a Luddite stubbornness on my part and not been into social media, didn't realize how fervent pretty much everyone else in the planet is. But, anybody else, any salesperson, the rest of the human race, if you want to sell anything in this world right now pretty much I think that you need to have a beneficial electronic presence. I am to the demographic where instead of really being a business owner, I think I'm starting to look myself more as a shopkeeper and I'm like Mr. Mares, you'd go in and while you're there, you buy a gallon of milk because it doesn't cost you any more in Kroger's, but you just like talking to Mr. Mares too. At this point right now I just don't have the energy to try to be what I thought we might be 15 years ago. What do you want me to feel as a customer when I walk out of here besides being happy or that I got what I wanted like what do you want me to remember about this pla? On both, and this is, I think honestly more up in the air for repairs then there's sales because on sales you know and they know because again, price shopping is something that is fairly simple to do these days. So, and again, this is not a concern that keeps me up at night because, I think we've done things so this doesn't happen, but what you should not feel is that you've been ripped off, that you've been taken advantage of and so many in the repair industry in general, people have this almost assumption that they are being ripped off and taken whether they're fixing your roof, for fixing your car, whatever they're fixing they are doing it for three times what they really, possibly could be in and that's the lack of being expert in fixing a roof, for fixing a car. So, you don't really know what the problem is and you don't. So, when they, if I've done the repair and when they picked a machine up as the receipts are being written and all that, there is communication over exactly what was done on the sewing machines, my receipts are hopefully lead to book because I do hand write them, but they are quite detailed honestly about, because sewing machines are pretty, they can be idiosyncratic in our, I can barely remember breakfast, if you bring it in next week and say I just had this saying in here maybe it did maybe it didn't, I have for sure maybe, I'll remember you, maybe I'll even remember the machine, I'm not going to remember what I did and I'm not going to, yeah whatever. So, it's a communication thing as much or more than anything else I think and that's true about almost every aspect in sales, but on the repair end you are still selling, you are selling that reputation, that reliable, that, "No, you didn't get ripped off feeling", so that when the same freaking thing happens again, they come back or either to buy a new machine or to keep on solving the problem because they should not be surprised if the problem recurs because we should have told them, "Hey, look this is probably going to happen again because this happens a lot on these machines." If it's something that doesn't happen a lot on those machines, then, they shouldn't be back in for the same thing in three months or five months whatever.
