The used Santa Claus costume and wig cost Becky Goblish $30 years ago, but getting someone to become St. Nick during the busy holiday shopping season runs the owner of Picayune Toys $12 an hour.
When Santa stood outside the store last weekend, he brought some shoppers in. But no more than a dozen people came to the Dunwoody store looking for him Saturday, and Sunday, just four people went to Picayune seeking the red-clad gift-giver.
The results, Goblish said, were disappointing.
Still, the toy store had strong sales through the weekend. It just wasn’t Santa that brought them there.
In part, Goblish said, that might be because many of her customers celebrate Hanukkah, not Christmas. She has Christmas lights up, but she also has Hanukkah wrapping paper, silver labels and blue ribbons.
“It’s probably not as effective as in other areas,” she said of Santa Claus. “It’s not the main topic around here.”
As retailers enter the homestretch of the holiday shopping season, they’re weighing the benefits and costs of extra sales, moving items on the shelves and offering extras — like Santa — to bring customers through the door. They’re paying attention to the plans they had made, noting what worked and what didn’t, and hoping they can take steps to make the year end with a bang.
Some of the changes can be simple. New flowers or different decorations on a table of shoes can draw out colors and make the table look different, said Kristen Smith, chief financial officer at Abbadabba’s, which has five metro Atlanta locations.
“It’s keeping the floor fresh, it’s moving things around,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of shifting going on pretty much every week.”
Moving items around can help customers see things that have been in the store for months, Smith said, but that they overlooked on previous visits. Goblish said she moves items constantly, to make them more visible. Some smaller items are pulled closer to the register, where shoppers are more likely to see them when they check out. Others, that are selling slowly, are given places of prominence to draw shoppers’ attention.
Last week, Goblish shifted her dollhouses around. She had too many and they needed to sell.
“People are funny,” Goblish said. “If you move things, people come in, they’re convinced they’ve never seen it before.”
Moving items is an easy way to refresh a store, but retailers sometimes wrestle more with having sales, questioning what is worth discounting and when a sale should run.
When Darryl Peck got the opportunity to buy heavily discounted MacBook Airs for his eight-store PeachMac chain, he took it, and the move was a good bet: the computers sold well. But he rejected another discount offer, saying he thought the second opportunity would dilute the impact of the first. And the discount wasn’t as good as on the MacBook computers.
Peck wondered, too, whether he would be able to sell all of the second item. He decided he might not be able to.
“You have to decide when you’re going to jump, when you’re going to sit on the sidelines,” he said. “Does it dilute the other offers available?”
Smith, at Abbadabba’s, is struggling with a similar question. Sale shoes have been big sellers this season, and a Black Friday promotion that further discounted the sale items did well. Abbadabba’s still has shoes it wants to clear off its shelves, but the store makes more money on full-price items.
Smith is wary, too, of having too many sales too close together. She doesn’t want the company’s stores to have a discount feel, she said.
The solution might be an after-Christmas sale, she said. It will keep the brand’s perceived value high before the holidays, but still let the company clear the shelves, freeing up money in the budget to order the latest styles.
“We don’t want to get our customers used to the idea that we mark stuff down every week,” she said.
Small stores competing against the retail behemoths have the benefit of flexibility. Peck had it in deciding to sell the MacBook Air. He bought and marketed the product in five days. Smith has it in deciding the timing of the company’s sales, and whether to have them at all. And Goblish said she can win customer loyalty by opening boxes and demonstrating toys and games — something that can’t be done in a big-box environment.
Ellen Ward, who co-owns FoxTale Book Shoppe in Woodstock, said she is able to offer customers discounts if they ask for them, something she could not do if she worked for a large chain — and something she has been doing with increasing frequency.
As a small, independent store, Ward said, she needs the full sale price. But she reasons that working with customers to meet their needs may engender their loyalty, and keep them from simply going online to price-shop their reading material.
“We can appreciate what people are going through, too,” she said. “We’re willing to bend.”
But Ward said she has had to take extra steps to ensure a successful December. Normally, she wouldn’t have authors to the store during the busy month, and she wouldn’t sell books at off-site events. This year, she has done both. Without those extra sales, she said, FoxTale would really be hurting.
The author events help draw people to the store, Ward said, and it’s much easier to make a sale when she can recommend books to shoppers, and put them in their hands.
When she was planning for the holidays, Ward said, she thought she might need the extra boost. And she’s glad that she made the move.
“We needed all we could get,” she said.
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