Some places get kickbacks from the mall or strip mall to keep a store in an undesirable location so that there aren’t any empty stores giving the place a deserted look.
Dave & Buster’s actually has a pretty good model. They’ve got a full bar & grill, their machines are maintained so people actually want to play on them, and the games are geared toward those you can’t easily emulate with consoles or the PC.
Of course, that pretty much translates to shooter games, basketball and skeeball games, DDR, and trivia, but it’s still fun. I had a blast at D&B last time hanging out on the big 6-player trivia machine competing with everyone else.
You’re right, though, that the old-school arcades we remember are pretty much dead. They’ve had to find a niche to keep going, and I rather suspect D&B makes more money off their food than their entertainment.
I guess that the math has to work, or else they would have been out of business long ago. They also take out full page ads in magazines. Maybe I’m underestimating the aggregate American demand for learning foreign languages. However, my company has 10,000 employees. As part of our diversity goals, we provide free lunchtime Spanish and Mandarin classes, with real teachers. Employees only have to pay for the textbooks, which are less than $40. At any given time, we may have 50 students enrolled in a class, with lots of excess capacity.
They don’t sell phone batteries or a lot of other types in grocery stores. Of course, they didn’t stock MY phone battery but then neither did Verizon.
Big Lots doesn’t sell much stuff for $.99. It seems to me they’ve positioned themselves a bit above the usual dollar store (which are depressing, horribly junky places) with somewhat better stock – although not always. Their household items, such as kitchenware and cleaning supplies, are as good as any you’d find at Walmart, Target or even a middling dept store like Belk. True, stock rotates and it’s maddening not to always find exactly what you want, but sometimes you find a true bargain.
I guess my vote would be for our local cell-phone charger and beeper shop, a tiny shack on the local boulevard. Been there for years. Is a dedicated brick-and-mortar outlet, half of it for somewhat outdated technology, and the other half for stuff you probably obtain more easily by other means, that feasible? Must be.
Part of 7-11’s business model is that they’re always open. If I can’t remember if Walgreen’s closes at 10 or 11, and there’s a 7-11 if I turn left instead of right, I’ll just go to 7-11 because I KNOW it’ll be open. Do that a few times, and 7-11 is now my default, even at 6:30pm.
Some dollar stores are bad, some are quite good (clean, well-stocked, convenient). I can go to Dollar General and pick up all my household crap (paper towels, bleach, detergent, beauty items) and pay the same prices as Wal-Mart, in half the time it takes me to get into Wal-Mart from the parking lot.
Can you elaborate on why that’s utterly absurd? They’re raking in tons of dough doing it and it’s obviously a great business model.
Here are some business models that don’t seem like they should work:
[ul]
[li]YouTube[/li][li]Twitter[/li][li]link-shortening services like bit.ly[/li][/ul]
Oh wait, that’s because they don’t, and they’re all losing money. Almost forgot!
In addition to the aforementioned online sales thing, if the shop does any kind of pinball sales or service, it’s probably doing okay. Pinball machines are pretty complex to work on, and there’s a decent number of collectors with deep pockets who are willing to pay $50 to $100 an hour for repair and refurbishment. The guy also probably deals/services arcade games in general (and maybe jukeboxes and such), expanding his potential market, and arcade parts are a favorite for people building controllers for gaming.
I’ve spent a couple of thousand with my local pinball parts guy in the last few years while restoring two pins and three video arcade games, and happily paid $500 in a single service call get a 1960’s Gottlieb pinball machine fixed, cleaned, and playable. I’m about to spend a few hundred more to get my Pac-Man monitor replaced… so I think my pinball parts guy will be able to cover some of his bills this month.
I’m not friedo but…
The OP is business models that don’t seem to work. The implication is that they really do.
In this light, Netflix is a good answer because it was so radically different than all previous movie rental operations. In a business where a) the entire purchase decision is often within a few hours (the time from when the customer decides to watch a movie until the time they start watching it) and b) the movie is rented and returned typically within a day or two – the Netflix model was very counter-intuitive.
With Netflix, the customer orders a movie way ahead of time, may not get the movies in the order requested, and the customer can then keep the movie for as long as they want. It is completely different from what rental businesses thought people wanted.
Yet they and redbox pretty much just crushed Blockbuster.
I reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally want to know how they can ever monetise the first two. Sure they’re ubiquitous in the west and we now can’t imagine them not existing, but I can see Twitter being replaced by something else in the next few years and it probably will never have made money. Youtube should be able to make money and it astonishes me that they don’t.
The one I wonder about is facebook. How is it worth eleventy hundred jillion dollars? I appreciate I’m no economist but :dubious:
I think it’s more or less been proven that the first model was the counter-intuitive model. Everyone always bitched about late fees, and most people kept a mental queue of the movies they wanted to watch. It wasn’t that big of a leap to figure out that allowing people to easily create a queue of movies and get rid of late fees would result in a better, more popular business model.
Redbox has late fees.
Do you use Facebook? There are ads everywhere.
The short answers
- Yes, some people will buy that stuff 'cause they think it looks ‘homey’ or ‘classy’.
and
- The margins on that stuff can be obscene. They make way more profit on a $100 of kitsch than the cell phone store makes on $100 of phones & accessories.
In the same strip mall as Batteries Plus in my town is (was) an Ink Stop. You can get printer ink at any office supply store, any electronics store and any department store (are Target/Wal Mart department stores?) No idea why anyone thought selling nothing but ink to consumers would be profitable.
I can see having a B2B business that sells ink in bulk to other businesses, but a store front just to sell ink? Fuck off.
I do believe the chain went out of business recently, tho.
I can see how YouTube and Facebook make money on ads. But Twitter and services like bit.ly? I don’t know anyone who actually visits Twitter.com anymore, and bit.ly’s whole business model depends on 1 person visiting their site for however many hundreds or millions of people end up using their service.
Wait. I thought friedo was making the ha-ha? I am so confused.
I can only speak for the Japanese language but, trust me, you’re fooling yourself if you believe you’re going to even become conversational, much less fluent, by using Rosetta Stone, no matter how much time you put into it. The program is simply not designed that well, and makes glaring and false assumptions about how humans learn, use, and retain a language.
I have to hand it to them though. They certainly have a great marketing arm, and thousands of customers who buy their products…and give up after three months.
Don’t waste your time.
Not only that, but Facebook has a wealth of information about you that allows them to sell their ads at a premium. This is one of the things that concerns Google. Google has put a lot of effort into mining your search data and your Google app usage in order to provide targeted advertising. But FB has the potential to amass a lot more personal info just from what their users volunteer.