This is just me venting and my opinion….but I would LOVE to hear YOUR opinions (even if they differ from my own.)
In the news we are all the time seeing a posting of where businesses are closing down their brick and mortar locations or they are cutting back on what they are going to offer their customers. Now, there are a lot of reasons why that’s happening. One of the biggest reasons that comes to mind for me is the fact that no one feels that they have to provide quality service anymore.
I’m going to take Blockbuster and Gamestop as my two examples. In our town, they are the only well advertised places that offer current movie rentals and sell games and etc. They must feel that they are irreplaceable and that the customers here will remain loyal regardless of their actions because they have what we want. Unfortunately, to be quite honest, they may be right in assuming that. However, they are cutting their nose off despite their faces left and right!!! I’ve seen so many new managers take over these two locations its unreal (just in the past three years alone.)
Here’s some bullet points of why I feel they aren’t going to last much longer:
- They aren’t opening their doors ON TIME,
- When we call corporate office, they don’t seem to care one way or another,
- They aren’t getting products in ON TIME and
- There is a lack of professionalism.
Those may seem like minor things to you. However, minor things ADD up to BIG things!! I know at both locations that I’ve not been the only one waiting on them to open their doors, and that many of the customers left mad as fire. That is money they’ve lost and a chance at building a loyal customer base. When they don’t get their products in on time then they are losing money with that as well. Plus they are making it so that their customers can’t trust them to carry it like they should. Then customers get in the habit of looking for the products else where.
Now, all of that brings me to the point that many companies are doing away with their brick and mortar locations. That doesn’t hurt people who have unlimited Internet and fast service, but for people who live in rural areas that is a whole different ball game!!! For people like me, we aren’t able to take advantage of many features on the Internet because we don’t have unlimited Internet. Do businesses think we don’t give them enough of a profit to make it worth their while???
Now, I’ve operated restaurants in small towns. I’ve seen the numbers start off as extremely small, but once they learned that the crew cared about having them there…we raised up our sales dramatically!!! There became no question about whether or not that location needed to stay open anymore. Us rural people like to enjoy nice things and do things as well. However, we do tend to be more selective on how we spend our money and our time because we do have to drive to go do “spend money.”
How is it going to affect you if these businesses continue to shut down their brick and mortar locations??
