Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 12, 1991 TAG: 9103120143
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Fast food restaurants offer us meals with little waiting. Home-delivery pizza services put pies on our doorsteps.
Personal fitness trainers design programs to help us shed pounds, then watch solicitously while we do the work.
As far as we know, no one has franchised a personal shoe-tying service yet, but that day may not be far away.
With the rise of packaging and shipping businesses, we can even have that tintype of Aunt Eustacia wrapped and sent to Cousin Cleve in Butte - sparing ourselves wrestling with the brown paper, battling with the gummy tape, dragging it to UPS or the post office and being told that our handiwork fails to meet the regulations.
The packaging store will do just about everything except put a smile on Eustacia's hard, old face.
Private postal companies that supplement the U.S. Postal Service are becoming big business. At least three different companies have retail outlets in Roanoke, where customers can get packages wrapped and shipped and purchase a host of other services. Some stores offer mailbox rental to individuals and businesses, fax and photocopy services, greeting cards, gift wrapping, rubber stamps, postage stamps, window lettering and notary service.
At one, you can even get a short-term loan on your impending income tax return.
Lots of people need this sort of service. Why?
"Everybody has no time to do anything," says Keith Myers, who operates three Packaging Stores in Roanoke, Salem and Blacksburg.
So it seems.
"At Christmas this place is absolutely swamped,' says Dan Harmon, the 47-year-old insurance man who bought the seven-year-old Message and Parcel Depot last September. At Christmas, eight people worked full-time and took their lunches on the run.
"We don't compete with the post office," says Lenny Wilson, who owns Mail Boxes Etc. in the Oak Grove area with his wife, Joyce. "We're their biggest customer."
What these people have found - often in magazines aimed at entrepreneurs - is a niche to give service to those who don't have the time or desire to figure out packaging and shipping for themselves or to wait in long lines at the post office.
UPS doesn't pick up at residences. But it does stop regularly at the packaging places. An individual who wants to ship a large item may face several telephone calls, complicated packing schemes and delays. The packaging specialist can pack it and arrange transportation in a snap (and Myers will even come and pick it up).
Small businesspeople may not have a spiffy address for their correspondence. They can rent a box by the month and get an instantly impressive "Suite thus-and-such" for their return envelopes. If they travel a lot, they can cease worrying about theft from their home mailboxes. And if their travels bring them to town at odd hours, they still have 24-hour access to the boxes. They can even ask the mailbox-provider to toss out unwanted junk mail and forward the rest of the stuff.
Carl Ziegenfuss moved to Roanoke from Lubbock, Texas, to set up his vacuum cleaner distributorship. He rents a box from Mail Boxes Etc. He has a suite address ("It looks like a real office setup") and a means of keeping his business correspondence separate from his personal mail.
"The ideal candidates [for mailboxes] are the typical operators of any type of small business - real estate, insurance," says Message and Parcel's Harmon.
Keith Myers' Packaging Stores do not offer mailbox rental. Instead, he specializes not just in UPS-approved packages of 70 pounds and below, but bigger things, as well. Only 20 percent of his business is in the bigger items, but they provide 50 percent of his revenues.
Among the unusual objects he has packed and shipped were a stuffed, two-headed calf going from Floyd County to Ripley's Believe It or Not in Florida, a hot tub from a woman in Roanoke to her son in Atlanta, an engine for a vintage Corvette in Miami and a Mazda 626 sent from Blacksburg to Taiwan.
That was for a professor who was going home after a stint at Virginia Tech.
"We stay afloat on unique items," Myers says. "It takes a lot of packages to pay the rent."
Myers opened his first Packaging Store, a franchise out of Englewood, Colo., in 1986. The Wilsons opened their Mail Boxes Etc. last September. Begun in 1980, the chain is a franchise business with more than 1,200 outlets in 44 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico and Japan. Last year, the United Parcel Service bought a 17 percent stake in the company.
Harmon's Message and Parcel Depot was begun by Geraldine Chivas in 1984.
Myers learned of the business from his father, who read about it in Entrepreneur Magazine. At the time, the son was a food and beverage manager for a Holiday Inn in Bristol. The pair co-signed a bank loan to get started.
The Wilsons came to Roanoke after tiring of a 90-minute commute, each way, from their New Jersey home to their jobs in New York. They chose Mail Boxes after examining numerous franchise opportunities.
The alternative postal business has been good for some who have tried it. Mail Boxes Etc. reported $235 million in sales in 1989 and $338.4 in 1990, according to Entrepreneur magazine.
The entrepreneurs say their future will be bright as long as people feel pressed for time. Jerry Majnich, a probation supervisor for Roanoke City's juvenile court, carves waterfowl decoys in his free time and ships them to a distributor in California, paying Myers to pack them and handle the details.
That gives him more time to create his products, he says. The service never seemed more valuable than recently, when he decided to recycle some foam peanuts by packing 200 decoys himself.
"It took me all day to get those things together," Majnich says.
\ ***CORRECTION***
Published correction ran on March 20, 1991.
\ Because of a reporter's error, a story on packaging stores in the March 12 Extra section contained incorrect information about United Parcel Service's pickup policy.
For a fee, people who wish to send a package by ground transportation can arrange for next-day pickup at their residence by calling (800) 552-3908. UPS also offers same-day pickup for packages shipped by air from ZIP codes 24001 to 24019, according to John Hastings, the company's customer service area manager.
\
Memo: CORRECTION