Spring Break outlook bright for local businesses
Posted: March 18, 2010 07:12 PM
Well, I hope they're right.
As a store owner, you have to try to guess what the customers are doing or are going to do.
Pretty much impossible, but you have to at least try. At least have a range of responses.
My feeling is that the overall customer buying is....draggy. Slow.
Sure, I've beat last year for 6 months straight -- but that has been like beating a famine survivor in a footrace. Not much of an accomplishment. Since I've added a couple of layers of product to the store since the Great Recession started, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine that we'd be down, or at best even, with the previous year if we had kept doing the same things.
I think this is the new base level. The new reality. It's going to be slow and draggy for years to come, and that it would be best to acknowledge that and to calibrate my business with that in mind.
As I mentioned yesterday, I'm pretty happy with the mix of product I currently have, my access to new material, and the margins. My location is pretty good, I've got plenty of experience. But to increase sales, I think I'm going to be looking at incremental improvements to all aspects of my mix instead of looking for one big thing.
In a way, what I'm saying is that we are probably even more dependent on tourism than we were before the crash.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that I think we are still attractive to outsiders -- especially downtown, which has maintained it's cohesion. And we still have the lakes and mountains and forests and everything else that has always been so appealing about Bend. The weather? Well, that's even more unpredictable than customer behavior, but it sure looks like it'll be nice over the next few days.
This Spring Break really snuck up on me. I almost forget it was coming.
We'll see.
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