Great impressions and recollections, this thread.
And my angle from a perspective rooted in both “kinds” of sales…
Yes there are two versions depending on the sales floor -
@Doodski gives quite a picture of
commissioned sales - surely the historically popular version for moving high end electronics. When I started working a corporate retail job (not electronics; non-essentials) in high school I read Joe Girard’s “How to Sell Anything to Anybody” - not quite so universal as the title suggests, parts now obsolete or so dated they can’t apply in a digital era without heavy adaptation, but essentially a more comprehensive take on what has been described of the sales floor/life in this thread. Good stuffs!
I stuck with
salaried (to include hourly-wages…) sales during my youngest formal working years, for knowing I lacked motivation one must live and breathe in the commissioned arena. If I’d tried to be a true salesman at that point it would’ve gone like the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where LD tries to sell cars. I did commissioned sales (services) well enough some years later.
Salaried sales is just my way of saying “customer service rep requiring considerable knowledge of the products and the overall field,” and may or may not be in line with nomenclatural reality of business jargon.
Begs the question which kind of employee(s) would work best in
your version of a hifi shop, as owner/head of sales/director of customer service?
Bear in mind,
salaried sales aka customer service rep is basically sales without monetary reward for being more successful than one’s colleagues. Employers must get lucky to find good workers for a salaried sales floor and then must hope they stick around. That’s not to say employers needn’t be lucky to get good commissioned salespersons, too. In my retirement, I would not want to do a 1-man-show as there seems nothing amusing in it; most would want an employee(s).
Whether the floor is manned by salaried- or commission-based reps, to open a shop based on non-essential goods begs, among other things, strong proficiency in (1) remaining professional and equitable towards all dispositions (as already stressed by others), (2) keeping the business predictable in hours and available personnel (no hobby schedules or revolving door of customer service reps, thanks), (3) being good with planning and numbers (if you are averse to mathematics,
really, don’t start a B&M business… or better,
any business), and (4) rapidly adapting to changes and trends in both your field and the geographic area of operation, plus the online competition with few of your B&M constraints…
(1) Everyone is your friend always. That won’t be easy. Depending on where you operate, people will bring up politics, faith, prejudice etc. and it would be your job to manage each engagement in a way that wouldn’t ruffle chest feathers and also wouldn’t come back on your biz. Enthused neutrality is a hard trade to ply, but it’s a must when you need to be everyone’s friend. It’s a tightrope prescription for acrophobia, so to speak.
(2) Your first sick day (whether in or out) is the first day you realize there’s no such thing as a true hobby-retirement B&M shop, I suspect. Your first busy day on which an employee calls in last-minute being the second such day, perhaps.
(3) It may be a hobby biz to you, but to the bank and government it’s very much a real biz. They will both care about your numbers even if you do not.
Helping the young department managers close out their register accounts (my first corporate job) on weekend nights long after I was due for release = how this once-16-year-old got to go party with all those fun 20-something’s. It was altruism based on numbers, literally. What would the stimulus be for that sort of responsibility during one’s retirement? I don’t see it, but I’m also not retired. Maybe 20-something’s now like to party with retirees?
(4) Enter an example of an exception to the top notch dress code discussed earlier: college-aged young adults comparing your turntable models/prices with those on Amazon via their phones might find a sleek-dressed elder fella to be less approachable as the same person in smart casual, but the legal professional who walks in after them, to look at 4- to 5-figure kit, may still subscribe to the original sleek, duded-up preference (indeed if coming from work, he/she may be donning similar sleek threads); depending on the optimal sales model in a given area, this could be an important discrepancy.
Limiting your corral of products based on technical specs and giving recommendations a-la ARS-style probably wouldn’t work well in more cases than not. Many people (=potential buyers) just don’t care and would view spins and any mention of controlled tests for quality validation as extraneous gibberish, no more comprehensible or worthwhile than the gibberish about how much more “air” one can hear from components XYZ. What is left for the hifi retail of yore in many countries/cities seems still rather inclusive of perceived value in undemonstrated improvements (cables, PSU’s, grounding/isolation devices etc.). To be at odds with that camp is not only to be a less profitable minority among your competition, but to be one who alienates could-be/would’ve-been clients. E.g. from
@Doodski ’s account: if I read correctly, he didn’t say “bad” he just avoided saying “good,” of the stuff that wasn’t demonstrable. That is a strategy one would
need to adopt in sales. Imagine: you were the seller, and Yamaha made different special-colored fuses or jumpers, and you told customers “fuses and jumpers of these sorts make no audible difference…” then it probably wouldn’t be
you the Yamaha person called regularly or dined with, no matter how much you liked and promoted their speakers.
“Snake oil” is an unscientific phrase, as it’s emotionally loaded, and polarizing among hobbyists and industry insiders alike. It’s the opposite of neutrally-/accessibly-toned education. Folks on the ASR website aren’t obliged to worry about that - it’s not peer reviewed and (thankfully) doesn’t seem to build such minutia into its rules and regs. But I wouldn’t wanna tread those waters, if the idea is to hang and chill with hifi peeps who will hopefully give me money. It’s literally like asking customers their political affiliation, telling them yours, and expecting it to go well for you more than ~50% of the time. Not actively recommending something and outrightly discrediting something are two different things and will often result in two different reactions from your audience. When it comes to sales, sharing your personal empirical-based take can hurt you far more easily than it can help you (again, sales floor-wise).
Now here’s a harsh reality not yet dwelt upon: many retail customers are not fun, let alone are they like archetypes of positive core-memories; folks who’ve actually worked sales/retail know this. For buying non-essential goods (like hifi), many people engage with a (A) spontaneous inkling, and/or fleeting interest, coupled with an (B) aversion to spending more money than they envisioned based on you’ll never-know-what-expectations-they-invented beforehand (this is where prowess and drive drawn from instinct + training, like
@Doodski described, separates the kids from the soldiers). Turning window shoppers or free F-T-F info-beggars into same-day buyers while Amazon, Best Buy and the like are competition-at-fingertips requires a rare knack in personality and knowledge (salaried) or an only-slightly-less rare passion for closing deals (commissioned).
@restorer-john mentioned shoplifters (I too, nearly spit out my coffee when I read “liaising”
). Not sure where you’re located,
@CleanSound , but a friend of mine in high school never went back into retail after he had a gun shoved in his face one evening at work - PT at a video rental shop - nothing more valuable in that store than ~ USD $25, so how much possibly could’ve been in the register? I don’t know, didn’t ask him, but I’m guessing less than a place successfully selling hifi goods, or at least in the mind of an armed robber? Another friend in high school was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment (while still in high school) for armed robbery of a convenient store. Don’t commit robbery, and especially not with an accomplice who weighs some 300 lbs… it’s technically not body-shaming for me to indicate such a fella stands out on security cameras and doesn’t enhance getaway speed. People make weird life choices and it involves retail and potential violence, sometimes.
Depending on state / nation, lawsuits in physical venues also represent a real world risk.
B&M if rented can be costly and whatever the contract cycle may be, can become highly unpredictable. I’m in a city that is highly skewed (legally and culturally) in disfavor of survivability for businesses of tenants, so I’ll leave rental hazards at that. A 2 year contract for property is nothing in terms of a business’s security, suffice it to say. Know business lease contract laws in your area and everything they don’t protect a tenant from.
It was already mentioned by
@steve59 - a strong alternative and considerably more affordable (in time, up-front investment, overhead, etc.) option would be to battle the increasing trajectory of online/forum anonymity by starting a F-T-F local hifi listening/demo club.
Considerable logistics involved, but at least it wouldn’t require daily input of hours by one person, could be facilitated by others during your occasional absences for illness or travel (or…?), wouldn’t require others to cut checks for weeks on end or fold outright if you went MIA at some length, and would be demonstrative
for you,
of your skills in networking and motivating people about hifi. If you do not have evidential reason to believe you
can network people into a following and that those folks
will look up to your way of blending personality and insight in learning/teaching hifi, then I think I can say a sales venture could be problematic. Bear in mind doesn’t mean your interest and fascination should be shelved - just find the other way to actualize it. Clubs, retreats, etc. might be great for that sort of thing.
My intended take home is not that retail is a bad venture. Getting into retail and sales with the intention of anything besides maximizing sales and optimizing your profit margin is a recipe for disappointment or worse, as others said. Pursuing that responsibility with a hobby interest, rather than one of numbers and competition, and trusting it to sort itself out seems highly improbable.
I’d do a club or, if legal protection / insurance wasn’t too bad, a retreat, instead.
I’m fine to just keep audio as a fun part of my entertaining room, so obviously all the above is anecdotal and goes great with a grain or two of sodium chloride.
