One-Stop Shopping

In this day and age, everyone wants one-stop shopping. The more services you can get from one place, the better the odds you will be going there next time around, which totally makes sense. While gas has started to come back down to a somewhat reasonable price, it is still way more expensive than it should be and so the fewer stores you have to drive to while completing your errands, the better. This would be the reason that Wal-Mart, where you can buy tires, a TV, lawn furniture and groceries within three aisles of one another, has remained one of the biggest companies in the world, even during the recent recession. They have a great advantage because when you are that big you can pretty much sell anything you want and it won't phase people. The thing is, as smaller businesses try to bring in a wider array of customers, it has led to a few owners making a couple connections which simply don't make much sense as you drive by at 45 mph. This afternoon I was cruising down the highway when I looked to my left and saw a small, local garage. The sign out front advertised you could come in and get an oil change and your car's A/C recharged. So far, so good. However, the next line informed everyone that now this was also a location to buy mulch. Yep, you lost me.

This is a pairing which would impress a mad scientist. First off, I feel like buying mulch, freon and motor oil at the same time will land you on some kind of terror watch-list. Secondly, those aren't the kind of items you go out to get at the same time. I have needed to do all those things, but I don't think they have ever happened at the same time. Also, none of them are impulse buys, which is key when trying to get a customer to make a purchase outside the range of what they intended to get when the left the house. No one goes out to get an oil change and decides to pick up a few yards of mulch while they are in the area. As such, they are too rare of errands to make combining them make sense. I appreciate the effort to help me get on my way faster, but I think the trick is to combine services which you may actual want or need to do at the same time. When you only sell a few items it is more important than normal for those items to make sense when paired together. The absurdity of horribly-mismatched items are easier to hide when they are just two of four thousand items for sale. But when there are only three items in the whole place, they need to match or else they stand out way too much.

[Sidebar: I can't tell, but I feel like this happens more on Cape Cod than anywhere else. You may remember a couple years ago when I wrote about the extremely odd combination of a magic shop and a "marital aid" store. While that combination was more creepy than odd, I can't help but wonder if this is a product of the location or simply the mother of invention. It used to be that living on the Cape wasn't that far removed from living in a place like Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket, meaning you were kind of isolated. I remember reading a great book called "One Season, One Dream" about the Cape Cod Baseball League and there was a passage about how much the teams liked playing in Wareham because the town had places like McDonald's and shopping malls, which some players just didn't get playing in towns like Chatham. But now those days have pretty much faded away. Sure, there are some towns on the Cape which continue to fight to keep big chains from coming in, but that can happen anywhere, as I remember a few years ago Wrentham was fighting to keep CVS out. My point is that while the days of needing the doctor to also be the dentist, notary and post office have gone, but I'm not sure the mentality has faded away from Cape Cod just yet.]

Besides all that, I think there is something to be said for being really good at just one thing. The old adage is that a jack of all trades is a master of none. Well, that saying is taken to the extreme when the two tasks are at opposite ends of the scale. Honestly, are you inclined to believe that a garage sells really high-quality mulch? I'm certainly not. I know these two things are not comparable to start with, but just as a general rule I think it comes down to simply asking if you would buy the item at one place were the situation reversed. For example: would you get your oil changed at a flower store? If the answer is no you should probably not get your mulch where you get your tired rotated. I don't want it to seem like I'm picking on this one place, because I really do wish them success. (At least they are trying to be different. That should count for something.) I simply don't think they should start making plans for franchises across the country just yet. However, if in 15 years there are hundreds of mulch and oil change centers across the land I'm sure I'll be kicking myself for not thinking of it first.