Are you selling a 13-ounce pound?
I was in a hotel one morning and as I was
putting sugar in my coffee, I came up with the idea for this
column.
If you read the writings of a frequent
contributor of virtually any publication, I bet that one time
or another, sooner or later, you wonder how the author
continues to come up with ideas for columns, month after month.
I’m always thinking. So, for me, I come up with ideas all
the time and those ideas are sparked by an infinite array of
triggers. This column was triggered by sugar in my coffee.
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It used to be that a packet of sugar
contained “one level teaspoon.” And it said so on
the package. It doesn’t say that anymore and has not,
actually, for years.
It also used to be true that a pound of
coffee actually weighed, well, one pound. It doesn’t, and
has not for years. When a packet of sugar contained a teaspoon
of sugar, I used two of them.
When I actually bought a pound of coffee
— a real 16 ounce pound — it went 25 to 30 percent
further than it goes now.
The people who sell these items, arguably,
aren’t deceiving you. It says “13 ounces” on
the coffee can and it doesn’t say “one level
teaspoon” on the sugar packet. No deception involved, but
perhaps a clue that prices haven’t gone up as sharply as
they actually have. I haven’t a clue what a restaurant
pays for a case of sugar packets now or what they paid for them
in the old days.
My point is that they are giving you less.
They may want to fool you for as long as they can, but in
reality, they have reduced what you get and charged you more
for it.
Are you doing that with your shirts?
Have you stopped replacing buttons to keep
the costs of a button inventory and a button machine out of the
equation?
Have you stopped repairing your shirt
equipment because the parts are too expensive?
Have you reduced the wages of your
employees so that you can charge less for shirts or so that you
can make more profit?
Have you begun to under-portion your
detergent with the hopes that customers won’t notice the
shirts getting a little bit dingier month after month?
Have you stopped using the collar cone
because the light bulb burned out and replacing it simply
isn’t in the budget?
Have you quit replacing pads and covers
with the knowledge that customers never see that shredded cover
or blown-out air bag?
Have you quit attending trade shows,
seminars or peer-group meetings because they offer no value?
Have you started to stuff ten shirts into
a poly bag to keep that supplies budget in line?
Have you quit using hot water, arguing
that you are simply flushing it down the drain?
Have you become an innovator and decided
to reuse mark-in tags by simply hand-writing a new number on
the back of the old one?
My bet is that you haven’t done a
single one of these things. In fact, you have continued to do
everything that you have always done in order to be certain
that your customers get the same thing that they have always
received from you.
Yet, because of the pressures from the
world around us, we drag our feet when it comes to raising
prices. I submit that this is because we aren’t prepared
to explain why, if and when we are approached.
The reasons why are simple. It continually
costs more and more to maintain our desired level of service
and quality, regardless of how high or how low our standard may
be. Absorbing that cost — even once — can have
deadly consequences.
If we are resistant to increasing prices,
we, in turn fear that our customers view rising prices like we
do. We have become an industry of survivors. This may have come
about because we view one supplier as pretty much the same as
his competitor. Both sell hangers that do the same thing.
I’ll buy the cheaper one. Both sell
poly. What’s the difference? I’ll buy the cheaper
one. You’ll buy a truck load of things from the catalog
because you’ll save a bundle. As a direct result, we
assume that our customers will go elsewhere to save a dollar
here and there.
You may be quick to insist that they will.
Although in my heart of hearts, I want to disagree, let’s
go with your thought that they will drop you without a second
thought. You must believe that when they visit your competitor
they will notice a difference. What kind of a difference will
it be?
You have control over this if you think
about it for a minute. If you fear that your customer will be
more pleased with your competitor than they are with you, then
you really need to raise your standards, don’t you think?
Maybe your “packet of sugar”
no longer contains “one level teaspoon.”
Donald Desrosiers has been in the
shirt laundering business since 1978 and is a work-flow systems
engineer who provides services to shirt launderers through
Tailwind Shirt Systems, 867 Spencer St., Fall River, MA. He can
be reached by phone at (508) 965-3163 or by e-mail at tailwind1@comcast.net and he has a web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com
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