Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 6, 1993 TAG: 9302060076
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Sandra Brown Kelly
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WOOING CUSTOMERS IS THE NORM
Last week, several furniture manufacturers reported good news about their 1992 sales. But, each company also said the news didn't mean everything was hunky-dory.The simple fact is that hardly anyone really needs to buy furniture. And that means a $35 billion-a-year industry is driven by consumers' whims - specifically, our confidence that we'll continue to have jobs and incomes to support big-ticket purchases like furniture.
We're a hard sell when it comes to home furnishings and more and more retailers are looking for ways to reel us in.
Anyone who has ever been in a Grand Piano & Furniture Co. store has been offered a Coca-Cola, or in recent years, a Quibell water. The stores also sometimes invite customers for breakfast or brunch.
But during the holidays, the Grand store at Valley View Mall went still further to accommodate customers. It began keeping later hours on Saturdays.
There was nothing scientific about the decision to stay open until 9 on Saturday night, said manager Richard Riley.
"I just got tired of finding people who wanted to come in to shop when I was locking up at 6," he said.
The Valley View store's first year of business was so good it was "beyond expectations," said the manager.
But, you don't let up, said Riley.
"That's why I never say never on Sunday openings," George Cartledge Jr., president of the Roanoke-based Grand Piano & Furniture Co., said recently. Estimates are that 15 percent of retail sales are made on Sundays.
While Grand stops short of Sunday openings, it has looked for other ways to increase its customer-friendliness.
For instance, people expecting furniture deliveries don't have to wait all day for the truck. They are called on the morning of their delivery and given information about when to expect the truck to arrive.
Furniture stores don't just get competition from other furniture stores. They have to compete with a variety of furniture sources from department stores to electronics merchants such as the Holdren's that Grand employees can see from the front door of their Valley View store. Holdren's now carries a full line of sofas and chairs designed to be used in home entertainment rooms.
Because the industry is so fractured - many manufacturers and many places for us to buy their goods - it changes as slowly as a battleship turns.
But, nothing it does matters unless stores can get the customer in the store to look.
Most retailers are "selling the same old way," says Gerald Birnbach, chairman of Rowe Furniture Co. in Salem.
"They're heavily into screaming `sale' all the time . . . so people have gotten numb to it."
Retailers have to make going to the furniture store "more interesting and attractive," said Birnbach.
Shoppers between 30 and 44 years of age buy 39 percent of the furniture. That's a group used to being wooed and a group that's hard to please.
For instance, Ethan Allen Furniture Co. is trying to shed its image as a source for traditional (stuffy to some) furniture for people with fat wallets.
It has put on a contemporary furnishings image and is selling itself with an Oldsmobile-like theme that Ethan Allen is not "your parents"' store anymore.
These are tame tactics, however, compared to what is going on about 40 miles south of Boston, in Avon, Mass.
There, family owned Jordan's Furniture this year invested $2.5 million in a gimmick called MOM, a Motion Odyssey Movie. If you've ever done the spaceship ride at Disney World, it's something like that.
With MOM, a customer can experience a wild dune-buggy ride, a fall from a skyscraper or a high speed police chase, all managed with a huge screen, a film and seats that move.
And to get new experiences, "all you have to do is change the film," said Eliot Tatelman, who runs the business with his brother, Barry.
So far, he hasn't had to change the film. More than 400,000 people have "experienced" Jordan's since MOM was installed in May. Tatelman said the president of Sony Corp. was a recent visitor.
Forty-eight people can ride at once. The cost is $3, so MOM has collected $1.2 million for the company in addition to having boosted the store's sales by about 40 percent.
Tatelman said the decision to buy MOM wasn't a drastic step for him and his brother because Jordan's has been trying to be different for a long time.
"We went to one price [no discounting] 20 years ago," he said.
The company also did silly things, like give away a house in a contest in which customers had to lie on a Jordan's waterbed.
Now, the store sells popcorn and ice cream in the lobby and in a theater offers a laser-light show with rock music and plumes of smoke.
And it sells furniture, including some of Rowe's, which it only recently started carrying.
And it has attracted a lot of attention from furniture industry people who want to see how Jordan's markets furniture. Does that mean there will be MOMs among the Queen Annes everywhere?
Other retailers "are in amazement when they come here," said Tatelman. "But they have trouble relating to it."
Sandra Brown Kelly covers retailing and consumer-related issues for the Roanoke Times & World-News.