A Lesson From a Discount Store

Consumers are not spending their money freely so a national discount store is promoting and offering a lay away program that allows their customers to pay for their casual furniture over an 8 week period, giving their consumers a way to purchase these big ticket items without feeling overwhelmed.

Perhaps you too offer this in your specialty casual furniture retail store. However, in the event that you have not considered this strategy, maybe now is the time to revisit a lay away program for your store.

People feel differently when they don’t have to come out of pocket with all the money at one time, nor run up their credit card bill that carries high interest rates. They can rationalize a purchase when they are paying over time. It somehow feels less expensive to them and much more doable.

So why not encourage or offer this purchase option, so that you can generate more sales?

Just because a discount store is offering this does not mean that you will become a discount store, you are still selling higher priced and usually higher quality furniture, you still provide superior customer service and can educate your customer on the product they are interested in, you are simply offering a way for a customer to purchase what they want over time. Otherwise they may miss out on an opportunity to buy a particular set.

For those retailers that already utilize this system I would love to hear from you on how it is working in this economy. Write a comment to let me know.

These are my outside views…Marcia Blake