Betting On The Future: How To Survive This Holiday Season

Question: What do retail jewelers have in common with Tarot-card readers? Answer: They both make their living by forecasting the future.

It’s true, don’t you think? Almost everything you do as a retail store owner, in some way involves trying to predict the future. When you go to a trade show and buy, you’re hoping you’ll predict accurately what your customers next week or next month will be looking for. When you wrestle with the decision of whether to open a second store across town, you’re guesstimating what might happen with your local economy in the next five years. Your decision about whether to renew your Yellow Page ad this year, versus putting the same money into banner ads on your local newspaper’s website, involves trying to forecast the sourcing habits of your target market.

Make the right bet, and you’ll have a record year for profits. Bet wrong…well, we all know what can happen if you bet wrong. Does this mean running a retail jewelry store is not much different than being a high-risk commodity speculator? To an extent, yes. It all comes down to betting on the future.

This holiday season that may be especially difficult. What’s really happening with the economy? We had the burst housing bubble. Then the sub-prime melt-down. The stock market’s been as volatile as the ocean surface in a Category Five hurricane. The Fed keeps trying to make everything warm and fuzzy by printing more money. That makes the value of the dollar continue its free fall against the Euro. But maybe that’s good if you’re an exporter. Job numbers are up. Except for last month when they weren’t. The Democrats are talking about tax hikes. But the Democrats are always talking about tax hikes. We’ve recently signed some key trade agreements in the midst of election-season populist talk about protecting American jobs—always a good leading indicator for trade barriers. And if present trends continue, soon our whole economy may be focused on expanding that eco-catastrophe called Ethanol. (Oh, to be a retail jewelry store in the middle of the corn belt!)

My hat’s off to anyone who can make sense of all this. Or more specifically, anyone who can predict whether this is going to be a great season for jewelry sales, a “Day After Tomorrow” consumer deep-freeze, or something in between.

Perhaps it’s immodest, but this is precisely the kind of environment in which Polygon can be so valuable. Rather than make high-risk wagers on what consumers will be asking for this holiday season, and possibly tying up your cash with precisely what the customer does not want, this year there’s going to be a premium on flexibility. Retail stores need to be especially nimble this holiday season. They can’t stock everything. But they can put in place a process, a culture, that let’s them be responsive to anything the customer wants.

Here’s what no one who works in a Polygon-member store should ever say to a customer this season: “No, I’m sorry, we don’t have that.” Here’s what they should say: “Yes, ma’am, we do have that. It’s in our vault which is offsite, but it can be here tomorrow.”

What’s the vault? Polygon of course. (Disclosure: This isn’t my idea. I heard it from a Polygon member who shared it at the Dallas conclave.) Think how much more powerful “It’s in our vault” sounds than: “Uh, no, we don’t have that exactly, but I could call around and see what I can find…” (Yawn. Bye, bye, customer.)

This holiday season, rather than trying to predict the economy and the holiday shopping mood, consider a different strategy. Train the sales people to always say ‘yes.’ Use your “Polygon vault” to ensure you truly can have anything the customer wants in the store tomorrow. Let the Tarot Card readers, the commodity traders, and the rest of the jewelry industry play the “predict the future” game. And you can enjoy a good night’s sleep!

Jacques Voorhees, Founder and President,
Polygon