Yup. It’s ridiculous whining because it’s not as though the market for “premium” products has vanished; it’s still there and it’s not rocket science to meet it.
If they failed it’s for one of two reasons: They had the wrong location for the premium market, or (smart money’s on this one) they weren’t competitive within the premium market.
There’s always going to be people who are willing to part with a little extra dough for crimini mushrooms marketed as “organic” (even if there’s no difference beyond the label, since there isn’t really place for chemical fertilizers or pesticides in mushroom cultivation) but even within this market you’d better make sure that your product is fresh, undamaged, and priced competitively in the context of what the other guys are charging morons who think “organic” mushrooms come from quaint little farms and that “regular” mushrooms are full of terrifying chemicals.
Blaming the customers for your own failure to research the market and adjust your posture accordingly is pretty funny. It’s like she never had any business education at all, and somehow managed to fail to absorb even the most rudimentary concepts about how a business is supposed to work. (Concepts that most people manage to pick up before they get to high school.)
It would be awesome if customers were willing to accept the responsibility for ensuring the success of small businesses, just as a matter of principle. It’d be awesome! “I know, we’ll just scrape up enough cash to lease a shop, and hang up a blank shingle. Customers will just come in and give us their cash, in order to ensure the continuing possibility that we might offer a product they actually want at an agreeable price at some unspecified point in the future. We’ll work out the details later, but honestly, we can’t lose!”
Well, you’re right in most instances, but there is a concept in marketing that high price can be part of the appeal of an item. Consider designer jeans; yes, they are typically well-made and well designed, but you pay a significant premium for the designer label. The designer label doesn’t add any value beyond marking you as a person who has the means to buy such an expensive pair of jeans. This is desirable to some people; after all, part of the point of designer jeans (or a Rolex, or whatever expensive brand-name item that is not intrinsically better than a generic, fundamentally identical item) is to let people know that you can afford to spend lots of money on this.
I don’t think that this store manager understands the concept*, but there are things for which high price is part of the appeal and the marketing strategy.
*I’m impressed she can tie her shoes in the morning, frankly.
True, but as you said the store manager here didn’t understand how this works. She seemed to feel she could just charge a lot of money and that would create prestige for the product. It doesn’t work like that. You have to establish the prestige of your product first and then you can charge a premium price for it. But she skipped that step. Her customers and the general public had no reason to think her products were more prestigous than the products at other stores. Nobody was going to be impressed because you bought your eggs at her store.
The only market near this model is where people pay farmers to plant crops and breed animals for a percentage of the outcome in the future. Yes I’m willing to gamble I’ll get a great Christmas ham in the end. This does have a limited market that works.
In the first one they kill off the fish in the neighboring stream with fecal runoff. In the second the fecal matter has to be disposed of in a safer way.
No, chicken manure is a prized fertilizer on organic farms. Every operation I know has fences between the birds and the stream, and either gathers manure for composting or uses mobile “chicken tractor” pens to engineer the manure being dropped where it’s wanted to begin with.
Yeah, I buy veggies from a local community-supported agriculture farm. I also researched various area farms before choosing, checking their track record, offerings, and customer reviews, because dropping a big chunk of change for a growing season’s worth of hopefully-awesome local veggies isn’t something I do lightly.
Reading the comment from the local cheese shop manager (in the article in the OP), I suspect that they didn’t know the difference between high-quality and high price, not to mention not having an idea of how to really provide good service.
My town had one dumpy cafe open only for breakfast and lunch, very limited menu, no table service – get your Coke out of the fridge and pick up your meal from the kitchen counter. It stayed open for 40+ years.
When the owner/cook retired, a local couple totally remodeled the place – looks great – but decided country-style food isn’t good for you, so the menu leaned toward salads and cold sandwiches, with an occasional “special”. They hired one person to cook and serve but who was more interested in talking on her phone and gossiping with the customers. Call-in orders from farmers weren’t ready on time and it took an hour for the lunch crowd to get their food.
The only cafe in town, and it closed after four months. I wonder if the owners have a clue what went wrong.
This meaningless truism:
[QUOTE=Arrogant Clueless Store Owner]
“The reality is we pay for what we eat…”
[/quote]
belies the actual reality: At that kind of business, you’re not paying for what you eat (i.e., the food itself). You’re paying a huge mark-up for a service (food preparation) that’s really not all that valuable. Do you think people are going to be paying for that when they can’t make their mortgages? Lasagna is easy to make, and if I’m unemployed I have all the time to do it.
Interesting discussion. I am quite sure that these people thought they could charge an enormous markup-that is because the Soth End of Boston is inhabited by lots of 6-figure income people (many with 7-figure incomes).
People with money sometimes confuse high prices with high quality-and these people may have misjudged their local market-it may be that there simply were enough upscale groceries, already in the area.
In any case, this reminds me of the time that Mercedes-Benz introduced their low-cost model (the MB 190) to the US market. The dealers and the customers HATED them!
-the dealers hated them, because they sold for under $20,000-much lower profit margins
-the customers hated them, because the “cheap” pricing diluted the snob appeal of the brand.
As for “free range” chickens-I doubt very much that having a chicken that eats bugs and carrion adds anything to the flavor-more important is having a chicken that hasn’t been killed and frozen and kept for several weeks.
