The Retail Business

Steve stopped by Computer Cleaners yesterday. A shaggy haired fellow computer geek who owns a shop in Hadley, he was coming to visit his northern brethren, and he chatted for a while.

He said that old style computer monitors use about 100 watts each, like a big lightbulb burning all night. And that the sleek new flat screen displays use just 15 watts. The electric company will pay a rebate if you change dozens of these screens, so he easily sells many many of them. He keeps the old screens in his dusty crowded shop on Route 9 in Hadley. Then he gets rid of the CRTs by offering them free to college customers if they put up 100 flyers in their dorms.

The retail business is one thing I remember well from my days as an ad rep for the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Working with hundreds of shopkeeps, I learned their techniques. Now we have a quasi-retail storefront of our own, here in busy South Deerfield village. With that comes the need to advertise, and we’ve done a lot of that. We mailed out letters to all of the P.O. boxes and did two Valpak mailings. We run buttons on the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Recorder Websites, and run regular print ads in the Greenfield daily. We are finding out which ones work, and pumping lots more into the ones that do.