I don’t know why this popped into my head, but here goes:
back in the late 1970’s, there was a really weird store in Cambridge, MA. It was called “Brandsmart”, and it sold electronics, appliances, furniture, etc. When you entered the store, you were given a little clipboard with a sales form on it. The store was weird because there were no pricetags on anything-if you expressed an interest in an item, a salesman would ask for your clipboard…as if to write up a sale. When you got your (verbal) price, he would take your clipboard away-you had to leave and come back to get another order form.
This seemed so idiotic to me-I went once and never came back.
Does this chain exist any more? And do they follow this very strange procedure?
In the Cleveland, Ohio area during that time, there were two chains similar to that. One was Service Merchandise, and I can’t recall the other. But there were prices on all the display pieces…you wrote stock numbers on the form on the clipboard, handed it in at the counter and the stock boys collected your stuff and brought it to the register where you paid. No one ever did what you are describing with the clipboards…in fact, there were no sales people on the floor at all. Prices were supposed to be much lower because of the lack of overhead and shrink. We bought tons of stuff from there.
No connection. There were several different Brandsmarts. I worked for the small chain in the Kansas City area and they had no connection at all to Brandsmart USA in Florida. I’d run into the Florida folks at the Consumer Electronics Show and CEDIA.
I believe the “catalog showroom” was exploiting some loophole in the agreements that major brand-name manufacturers had with longstanding retailers in big cities, particularly department stores or jewelry or hardware chains that had exclusive rights. The manufacturers had separate agreements with Edison Brothers, Bennett Brothers, Service Merchandise, Best, etc., regarding their catalog operations, and hey, who’ll notice if we sell some stuff at a side-door will-call operation? By the 1970s the tail was wagging the dog, and the idea completely died in the 1990s thanks to Walmart and Target.
However, the concept is still going strong in the UK in the form of Argos.
Not in the form the OP is talking about. Argos has all prices clearly listed in their catalogue and on the display items in the showroom.
When you visit an Argos store, you can look around the showroom or browse their enormous printed and electronic catalogues. Each item for sale has a number. You take a sales slip, write down the number of each item you want and the quantity you want, and take your slip to the order desk. The order desk takes your payment, gives you a queue number, sends your order to the warehouse, which gathers all the items and then calls your number when it’s ready for you to pick up.
The one you can’t remember could have been Key Distributors - they had a few locations from Central PA to Central Ohio.
In Ohio at least, we had Ardan’s and Best Products. Both are gone:
Ha, I worked for Present Company for about 3 months, I was hired as a warehouse runner, with the understanding that I was not going to be a cashier. About mid January the manager started pressuring me to be a cashier, but I had it on my application that I would never handle cash, and it was signed as OK by the manager that I was not hired to handle cash in any way. He was absolutely gobsmacked when he was pressuring me in the break room before work at a meeting and I got up, punched out and told him that I quit, that he was a liar and scum for pressuring someone by threatening them and making passes at them both. [apparently I was not the only female he was pressuring by making passes and if you screwed him he wouldn’t make you do whatever it was he was pressuring you to do, in my case become a cashier] and backed it up by playing a mini tape recorder of him hitting on me.
Damn that was a long time ago … I forgot all about that nasty place. I should put this up on customers suck =)
The last time I remember using that system was at a Service Merchandise in the mid-nineties, but I had been shopping there since the 70s (with the clipboard thingy). I think they went out of business in the late nineties.
Brandsmart was a membership discount store, along the lines of the “GEM Membership Stores” and forerunner (of sorts) to BJ’s and COSTCO. You had to belong to an organization that offered membership to Brandsmart as a benefit in order to be able to make purchases. my College alma matter allowed me that opportunity. I bought a Stereo and speakers there ( the latter of which I still have) in 1981, and remember that whole clipboard thing. Brandsmart had another location in RI, and they closed in the later 1980’s…
There were also agreements that you would not sell items for less than the ‘suggested retail’ price. But then the FTC put some pressure on about these, talking about “restraint of trade” and similar illegal activities.
And about that time the ‘big box’ stores (Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.) and the mass marketers/warehouse stores (Target, Wal-Mart, Costco, Sams, etc.) started really taking off.
The pressure from these developments pretty much ended that degree of manufacturer control over prices & sales.
We had Best products and Brendles and they always listed their prices. You had to fill out a form and they would get the product for you out of the back or upstairs. In a few cases the item would be on the shelf and you just bought it normally. I think most of those places were killed off by Target , WalMart and Best Buy type places.
But these catalog stores had price tags on everything. You went around, looked at the merchandise, noted the price, and wrote down the catalog number of what you wanted. You handed this to the salesperson who processed the order while you went to the cash register to pay. By the time you paid, the items were ready to be picked up.
The idea was that these places saved money by not having to stock shelves or have sales people all around. B&H in Manhattan still follows this model. You go around the store and find what you like (videos, cameras, etc.). A sales person writes up your order, and you go down to the cashiers line, pay, then to another line to pick up the merchandise. I went it to get a set of earbuds, and it seemed so strange to go through this whole process for a $30 pair of earbuds. However, the process was fairly quick and efficient.
Best Products was famous for their architecture. Not too sure why it died out. Maybe it was competition with Walmart, but I think it was more likely the wholesale warehouses like Costco which are very similar to there setup. Ironically, Best was voted one of the most efficient corporation in 1995 only to enter bankruptcy in 1991.
My family bought our Christmas presents at Service Merchandise for 15 years. The clipboard approach got tiresome. The pencil often very short and not sharp. People would write the cat # wrong. Checkouts were slow.
I think an updated version of this could be very popular. Replace the clipboard with an inexpensive order pad with bar code scanner. The customer carries it around the store, scans the shelf label, and it’s in his shopping cart. You need a few shopping cart features, delete, change amount of items. Standard shopping cart stuff. Checkout would be much quicker and efficient.
aruvqan, maybe it’s because I just got off work and haven’t been to bed yet, but why was it so important to you that you not be in a cash-handling position? Your story seems to leave out all the disadvantages of being a cashier.
Better yet, just publish an app and let people use their own phones. Have a wifi network that only the app can log on to, for transferring order info when you go to pay.
Ikea still uses this approach.
I enjoy shopping there because we always find such cool stuff with simple clean lines, but…
They set up their store so that you have to walk through the entire store, one-way, in order to get to the exit. There are some shortcuts you can take, but you need to actively seek them. If you just wander, you will walk from the front entrance, by every single bit of merchandise on both floors, and finally out through the checkout area.
One difference from the Service Merchandise approach: you fetch your own stuff these days. You pick out a nice desk, and your clipboard ends up with five different item numbers you need to find (e.g. the legs, the top, center drawer, side extension). You then go into the warehouse and fetch everything on the list.
I miss Service Merchandise: it was so uncluttered. They had one of everything on display and nothing else visible. No racks and stacks of merchandise.
I think that depends on the design of the particular Ikea store. In Chicago, we have two Ikea locations: the newer of the two is laid out exactly as you describe. The older of the two has a more open design.