Cool Idea of the Day: The Bicycle as Bookstore Sideline
Monkey See, Monkey Read, Northfield, Minn., which opened two years ago (Shelf Awareness, February 22, 2007), is now selling the Kona Africabike 2.0 in the store and online. In his blog, owner Jerry Bilek explains why he's stocking the $299 bike that he calls a "utilitarian riding machine. . . Single speed, coaster brake, chain guard, fenders, basket on the front, rack on the back, thornproof tubes, rear wheel lock."

He wrote: "I know, why would a bookstore sell bikes? It goes like this. Books and bikes are two things I enjoy the most. Okay, add beer to the list, but I don't have a liquor license. And ice cream, but no freezer. So I settled on bikes. Not just any bikes, one bike. The Kona Africabike."

Bilek added that a T-shirt phrase he summed up his views on the matter. It read: "Gas sucks ride a bike."

For every two bikes that Monkey See, Monkey Read sells, manufacturer Kona will donate one to a home health worker in Africa as part of the BikeTown Africa program.

Wal-Smart is another Wal-Mart book but this is a little different. As he says,

"As a consulting partner at Ernst & Young, I designed Wal-Mart's first-ever strategic planning process and ran it for three and a half years in the late 1990s."

"Wal-Smart is not a book about Wal-Mart. It is a book about what it really takes to profit in a Wal-Mart world: how to examine our options, how to choose the right ones, and how to win a second chance to succeed. Of course, Wal-Mart world has changed the traditional rules of the economic game. But the potential remains for all of us to raise our economic life while Wal-Mart continues to flex its economic muscle."

In the section about the DNA of Wal-Mart he talks about the practice they have of "Correction of Errors." He says:

"Correction of errors is all about identifying ways to improve customer experience, merchandise, processes, cost structure, and the company from within--before competitors beat Wal-Mart to it. The correction of errors practice carries throughout the organization. Newly opened distribution centers hold correction of errors meeting to share lessons and determine how to open the next center more efficiently. Home office leaders hold meetings to improve the loss-prevention process.
A cousin of quality management, correction of errors likely gained currency when Sam Walton read the works of twentieth-century quality guru W. Edwards Deming."

I have not finished the book and will update you as I get closer to the end.

Wal-Mart was expected to be the first major player in RFIDs. According to a December article in Business 2.0, now a Dutch bookseller is trying their hand at RFIDs. They "may be the first merchant to tag every single item on its shelves with wireless technology." They started in one store and are going to duplicate the efforts in each of the stories by mid-2008 (42 to go).

What's interesting is that the article says that RFID-store sales are up 25% than averages of other stores. Installation costs will be around $120,000 per store; their CIO Jan Vink predicts the benefit will be an increase in "the chain's overall profit by as much as 40%." Wow.

Each tag costs 25 cents and is typically the size of a piece of tape. No longer does each inventory arrival need to be pieced apart and compared to the order; now the box goes through a "RFID scanning tunnel" which "sees" what's inside. As for taking inventory, before it took a day (requiring a closed store) and costs $800,000 in labor and lost sales; now, it takes "two employees and two and half hours to scan 38,000 books."

Besides an extra shopping day, customers also benefit from the kiosks that "let shoppers pinpoint within seconds the exact location of any of the store's books." No more Dewey decimal system.

Maybe we'll see this more in the US soon. Barnes & Noble is sending its people to check out the mechanics.

*From Business 2.0 article: Tagged for Growth

When Charles Fishman’s publisher decided to publish one of my favorite books from this year—The Wal-Mart Effect—as a paperback, I thought they were making the same mistake. Here is my review of the hardcover from earlier. They must have heard my misgivings because Fishman has added a twenty page afterword to the paperback. It is a recap of what has gone on at Wal-Mart since the hardcover was published, which by the way, is a lot.

This is a book that really put this phenomenon that is Wal-Mart into an amazingly well written perspective. If you didn't get the hardcover, now is your chance to pick up the "New and Improved Paperback."

Oh yeah, the book is available the end of December.

In the last month, they have reviewed three books though. We mentioned the More Than You Know review a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to make sure we pointed you to the other two reviews.

On May 3rd (I know more old news, in this case I was clearing my desk this morning), WSJ wrote a review of Jeffery Gitomer's Little Red Book of Selling and Little Red Books of Answers. The first book now has 500,000 copies in print and appeared on WSJ's nonfiction and business best-seller lists a total of 71 times. The guest reviewer David Dorsey (author of The Force) writes:

...[W]hen Mr. Gitomer gets into details, his thinking is fresh and amusing. He offers five pages on crafting a good voicemail greeting. My favorite, though its facetiousness could wear thin after a few hearings: "Hi, this is Jeffery Gitomer. I wish I could talk to you but I can't. Please leave your American Express number with expiration date and I'll get right back to you." He claims three people dutifully recite the information and then hang up.

I think the piece is positive, but Dorsey takes a couple of digs for the simplicity of Gitomer's advice. He says that there really is nothing new in either of the books and that Gitomer is "useless" on some subjects. I can't argue with that.

Michael Silverstein and John Butman's Treasure Hunt was the book review that ran last Thursday. Laura Landro, a managing editor for the Journal, writes a lukewarm review. She feels it "occasionally reads like a brochure for BCG's services" and "uses somewhat glib pop psychology" to examine the featured consumers and households. Landro does like the authors take on growing gaps between luxury and cheap and how marketers can straddle the divide (for another take you can check out Jack's review from May).

Wall Street Journal - If you are listening, we would love to see the string continue.

Tindell says that Co-Opetition is:

"probably the best business book I've ever read. It talks about not being typical, paranoid business people, but rather looking for ways that your competitors and you can cooperate to strengthen both your businesses. We've followed some of the principals in this book by putting our stores right next to some of our competitors. It makes the shopping center a stronger draw."

Here is his complete list:

• Minding The Store: A Memoir by Stenley Marcus
• Co-Opetition: 1. A Revolutionary Mindset That Combines Competition and Cooperation 2. The Game Theory Strategy That's Changing the Game of Business by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff
• Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends On It by Al Ries
• Discovering The Soul of Service: The Nine Drivers of Sustainable Business Success by Leonard Berry
• A Thousand Barrels a Second: The Coming Oil Break Point and the Challenges Facing an Energy Dependent World by Peter Tertzakian
• Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in the Face of Adversity by Steven F. Hayward
• Appetite for Life: A Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch
• It's a Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra

• Charles Fishman walks around Wal-Mart with Washington Post reporter Bob Thompson and talks about The Wal-Mart Effect.
• Andy Kessler reads alot of business books, but doesn't know why because they mostly suck. He does see our view of the new business book as one that shows you a different way of viewing the world. He says Mr. China, Wisdom of Crowds, The Hypomanic Edge, and Everything Bad Is Good For You are examples of books that help you see into the future.
• Biz Book Talk reviews Lee Eisenberg's The Number.
• Business Evolutionist gives his take on A Whole New Mind.

This is an accomplishment. It is very difficult to unseat titles that are there almost every week like Blink and The Little Red Book of Selling.

We have a great interview with Charles over on the Podcasts Blog.

The tour will be at Brand Experience Lab tomorrow and Learned on Women on Friday.

Today’s shoppers are—depending on your point of view—either blessed or cursed by an overabundance of merchandise, amassed under one roof, in a retail concept that has had a profound impact on the consumer culture: category killers. Over the past two decades, category killers have dramatically altered our buying experience, becoming the most disruptive concept in retailing—and in everything that retailing touches.

Also known as “big-box” stores because of their mammoth footprint—twenty thousand square feet to more than one hundred thousand square feet—these retailers specialize in a distinct classification of merchandise such as toys, office supplies, home improvement—while offering everyday low prices and wide and deep inventories. They earned the sobriquet “category killer” because their goal is to dominate the category and kill the competition—whether it be mom-and-pop stores, smaller regional chains, or general merchandise stores that cannot compete on price and/or selection.

Category killers and Wal-Mart, the general merchandise retailer, have helped expand and upscale the “mass market” by aggressively driving down the prices of goods and services, and making affordable what were once upscale products such as laptop computers, big-screen TVs, or designer apparel. Today, virtually every one of us—regardless of income—is part of the ever-expanding mass market, where the differences among stores—Dollar Stores to Kmart to Bon-Macy’s—are measured in slight gradations. Consequently, loyalty to a particular store has become a casualty of our changing consumer culture. At one time, shoppers used to identify with a store, just as they identified with the make of the car they drove. Today, many of us simply want more and better goods, and we will shop the retailer that provides those goods at a price that we consider “affordable.”

'Toys ‘R’ Us created the template for category killers. The company presented to consumers bigbox stores with an emphasis on selfservice, big selection, low prices, and lots of parking. It conditioned baby boomers to a different kind of retail experience. The kid whose parents were buying toys at Toys "R" Us in the 1950s and 1960s eventually grew up to buy books at Barnes & Noble, power saws at Home Depot, printers at Staples, and pet food at Petco, and the shopping experience felt perfectly natural. Although the product categories were different, the approach was very much the same.

What we are going to do today is run an series of excerpts from the book over on the Excerpts Blog. They are all on the topic of bookselling. This is something near and dear to our hearts. I found some of Robert's stories about how big-box has changed publishing really interesting. I thought you might too.

They have written a new book--to be published in March--called Return on Customer.

They sent me the first two chapters and I want to share the first paragraph of the first chapter. I defy you to find a better description to what “business” is.

“Businesses succeed by getting, keeping, and growing customers. Customers are the only reason you build factories, hire employees, schedule meetings, lay fiber optic lines, dispatch service trucks, stock inventory, file for patents, operate call centers, negotiate contracts, write software, or engage in any other kind of business activity whatsoever…

Without customers, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby.”

First, I thought the title was pretty clever. I think it plays nicely off Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

When you open the front cover, you find the complete menu as you would find it at the Deli. From there, I think there is a great narrative about the history of the deli and what has made it a success. Throughout the book, there are recipes for favorites like Matzoh Ball Soup, Corned Beed Hash, and their world famous cheesecake.

Like any good business book, you need a list of the 10 things that made you successful. Here are the Carnegie Deli's:

1. Keep It Simple
2. Do One Thing Better Than Anyone Else
3. Create a Family Atmosphere Among the Staff
4. Promote from Within
5. Have an Open Ear to Staff and Customer Comments
6. Make It Yourself
7. Own the Premises
8. Management is Always Responsible
9. Do Not Be Greedy
10. Have Fun Working

• You start by reading the first chapter at the ABC's Good Morning America website.
• Nicole at Fuzzy Signals has a pretty extensive review of the book and she talks about how she has used Underhill's work on other projects.
• In their fifty book challenge, infinitejess.com is not so thrilled with the book.
• Monica and Deepak at webjives.com pull the book review from the Wharton newsletter.
• Jessamyn at jessamyn.com gives her take on the book.

• Dickless Marketing: Smart Marketing to Women Online by Yvonne DiVita
• Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson
• Selling To VITO (The Very Important Top Officer) by Anthony Parinello
• Networlding: Building Relationships and Opportunities for Success by Melissa Giovagnoli
• Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons by Lynn Peril
• Marketing to Moms : Getting Your Share of the Trillion-Dollar Market by Maria T. Bailey
• Pretty Good for a Girl : The Autobiography of a Snowboarding Pioneer by Tina Basich
• Why We Blog by Dave Young
• FutureConsumer.Com: The Webolution of Shopping to 2010 by Frank Feather
• The Natural Advantages of Women by Michele Miller
]]> Marketing 2004-05-27T07:31:27-06:00 http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/004866.html Rodent Regetta points to notes for the Berkshire Hathaway meeting and recommends his letters to shareholders. I agree with him that they are some of the best business writing available (and it's free). BPICS provides their top 20 books for... 4866@http://800ceoread.com/blog/
• Rodent Regetta points to notes for the Berkshire Hathaway meeting and recommends his letters to shareholders. I agree with him that they are some of the best business writing available (and it's free).
• BPICS provides their top 20 books for the manufacturing executive. I spent seven years working in manufacturing and I think it is a good list. Here are the must reads:
  • The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
  • The Machine The Changed The World by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos
  • A Revolution in Manufacturing: The Smed System by by Shigeo Shingo, Andrew Dillon
• Thinking by Peter mentions Call of the Mall