Here’s our latest (not yet out on TV) television ad for the Christmas season. I think it’s a nice ad, but without much video is it going to work? We’ll probably never know for sure. Some people will be drawn in by the music and pay attention. Others might not pay attention when it doesn’t have audio.
We’ll see how December does but the truth is we’re far more dependent on the weather than a TV ad.
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Our Toyland Flyer is out. This is 12 pages packed full of toys. These prices are good through Christmas Eve, but if we sell out of something there’s no way we can get it back in. So if something catches your eye you better buy it now.
I just posted our Grand Forks’s store hours on our internal forum. I thought I’d copy it over here.
Our Christmas Hours [In Grand Forks unless otherwise noted] will be as follows.
Friends & Family Day (November 19th) 8am to 8pm ALL Stores
Thanksgiving—Closed (It’s on a Thursday This year) All Stores
Friday and Saturday November 27th and 28th. 8am to 8pm.
All Sundays Between Thanksgiving and Christmas Noon to 6pm.
Monday thru Saturday December 1st thru December 13th 8am to 8pm.
Monday thru Saturday December 14th thru December 23rd: 8am to 9pm.
Christmas Eve: 8am to 4pm. All Stores
Christmas Day: Closed
Resume normal hours.
New Years Eve: 10-4 All Stores
New Years Day: 10-4.
Hours for Christmas Eve and New Years Eve/Day should be observed at all locations.
Last year we went 10-4 for both New Years Eve and New Years Day to make a bigger splash with our advertising.
Our Williston store has been hard at work redoing our clothing and footwear department. We’ve seen great, fantastic, wonderful, terrific….growth in our Carhartt and work books line.
One principle we’re trying to work on is to expand our investment in the areas that are expanding. We can do that in two ways. Buy more inventory AND give them some sales floor space. The first is easier than the second. It’s easy to justify adding more inventory when you’re growing. It’s harder to find sales floor space because adding space means taking away from another area.
So we were probably a bit late on this but we’ve got some great progress to report.
This is our new steel toe boot display. That’s right. These are all steel toed. We’ve still got a lot of soft toed work boots in addition to the men’s and women’s western boots. We do great out there as well in those lines.
I think this is a BIG WOW to the people when they walk in. That’s right to your right on the front wall when you walk in our front door. I think that makes a fabulous statement that if you’re looking for work boots you don’t need to check anywhere else.
We’ve also GREATLY expanded our Carhartt display in Williston. This picture is on the left side of the first picture. Prior to this our Carhartt was jammed in to the back. Barb and Trudy came up with a plan to move our best stuff up to the front. It looks great. Trudy, Judy, Keisha, Kari, Dawn and Cindy put together an amazing amount of work to get it looking this great this fast!
The clothing that was in this area has been moved down the hill a bit. We were able to consolidate some of the housewares and toys by going higher with the shelving. That gave us the ability to move the second tier clothing (Carhartt and boots are the top tier lines) into the area we opened up.
The bottom line is that we’ve got a lot more of the best product out without taking much away from the other lines. I think they did a great job.
The thing is though, that these projects aren’t a one time deal. We need to be thinking about how to do better with what we have 365 days a year. I guess Barb has plans for more changes after Christmas.
This was a very interesting product packaging innovation that we picked up this fall. What this product actually is is fire starters that are roughly the size of a dynamite stick. Well I’ve never seen a real stick of dynamite, but I’ve seen TV.
I don’t think you’d sell very many of them but his packaging just might do the trick. Because after you’ve used all of the starters you’re able to use the box as a prop or to hold you shotgun shells when you go to the shooting range.
This is a great idea for Christmas.
We do a fantastic job selling winter boots. It seems that every year we’re selling more boots.
It really seems that the boots are better quality and much cheaper than they used to be.
One thing I do with my boots, after I’m sure I’m going to keep them of course, is to line the back of the liner with some fine high quality duct tape*. That keeps the back of the liner from wearing out while making it easier to slide your foot in and out.
We also sell a ton of these Peet boot dryers. If you use your boots or other footwear a lot in the winter they are great to keep your feet dry. Not only will your feet be dryer and more comfortable your footwear will last a lot longer when they are taken care of.
*We can certainly help you out with all of your duct tape needs.
I’ll bet that a lot of folks aren’t aware that we have so much Sioux Gear for sale. A lot of stores have a lot of the product, but only at H of E will you get the Guaranteed Lowest Price on the best Sioux Gear.
We’ve still got some of the Nike Jerseys as well as the new Reebok Jerseys. Get them now because when they’re gone they won’t ever be available again.
We’ve got these nifty Fighting Sioux Christmas wreaths as well some Sioux Logo Christmas Ornaments.
Who took this picture? They must have been humoring our Human Resources guy who’s known as the token Bison fan around here. Don’t worry we’re nice to him.
These metal cutouts have been amazingly popular. We had an hard time keeping up with them when we first brought them in.
You can find our Sioux Gear right under the sign welcoming everyone to North Dakota.
This is my favorite commercial for a long time. I really like how they led in with the phrase “How do you get to be number one.” I know you’re not supposed to brag but if we don’t, I don’t think the competition is going to let everyone know that we’re the leader in Tires and Batteries in the Northland.
We’ve talked to a lot of people over the years, from suppliers to recyclers and yes, they all tell us we’re moving more product than anyone else.
It’s a funny story how we started publicly claiming that we were number one. A number of years ago Minot had a new tire dealer that was real aggressive with their advertising. Their point was that they were working REAL HARD to become number one. Well we couldn’t let that stand. We had to point out that it was Home of Economy that WAS #1 and that we were working hard every day to keep that standing.
I also like the background video in this. The landscape and truck is so typical of our market area that I think it’s going to be more effective than when the ad agency uses stock car video. I had to even double check that it wasn’t my yard in the background because we have a pipeline in the neighborhood like in the video.
I’m also glad that we’re highlighting pickup tires. That’s a key part of of our market. It’s a bit scary to do that because of course pickup tires cost more than car tires so you have to advertise an higher price point.
I was just doing this as a test to see if I could post to this website from my telephone.
This winter if we have any storm days where we can’t open (or have to close early) I’ll post our decision here. This is more for the employees than the consumers. I want our people to have a place they can check anytime to see what’s going on.
Our storm policy basically leaves it up to the individual to make the determination if conditions are too dangerous for them. Usually storm days the traffic is down so it doesn’t take many people to help the customers that do make it to work.
Since we sell emergency supplies of all kinds we feel we need to be open. We have dedicated team members so I’m pretty sure that if they can be here they will be here to help our customers.
Last weeks flyer had four pages of toys as well. I thought I’d do these in a separate post. We also have a Toy Flyer coming out this week. So toy season is ON!
Toys are getting to be a tough business. Not just for us, but for everyone. It seems that kids are growing up faster and want some expensive electronics at an age when we would have been happy with a Tonka Truck. I know that from personal experience.
The first page of our toy section is big in the horse and stable toys. We still do a pretty good business in this category. Breyer horses are something we’ve had since I was a kid.
Now we’re talking. Toy tractors and trucks. This is our biggest category. We do a great job with the Ertl toys. I think it’s funny how the implement dealers run a Christmas ad on their toys. We’ve got it all at a much better price then they can offer.
More toys for boys. For whatever reason it seems that the toys for boys sell much better for us than toys for girls. It’s certainly not from a lack of trying to sell toys for girls.
I think I want that crossbow set on the bottom.
Here’s our latest and greatest flyer that just came out last week. This flyer isn’t being produced by us so it is a bit different. We have limited control on the product placement. Still it’s not that we know everything so sometimes doing something different can teach you something. This flyer ends the day before Thanksgiving.
The front page as you can see announces this as a winter flyer. Right now it looks like we’re a bit early for winter stuff, but in North Dakota you never really know. Since this flyer has been weaker for us, it makes sense to run it before Thanksgiving when we know we’ll be busy one way or the other.
Still the front page has some real good items. We’d have been putting Carhartt Extremes on the front and Science Diet as well. That heated pet bowl is a fantastic item. We sell hundreds of them every winter. They work too.
Dewalt’s a great line for us to. We’re growing it 30% every year. And the gun safes are HOT HOT HOT this year.
Page has some nice items. We’ve got a BB gun (be careful you don’t shoot your eye out) and a lot of work clothing. We’ve also got some heaters which are nice for deer hunting time. (Keep them around for ice fishing as well.)
A nice Carhartt page with some gloves and boots at the bottom. That Kinco line has really done well for us without taking away from Wells Lamont.
We’ve got a real nice pet page here. This page is much like what we’d do ourselves. While Science Diet continues to grow beyond any other brand we’re doing very well in Diamond, Iams, Nutro, Pedigree and the rest. I’m told you’ve got to have a complete selection and not just focus in on one brand.
I’m skipping pages 5 thru 8 right now because they are all dedicated to toys.
Here are some tools, including some more Dewalt.
Here’s a page I think they underdid. If we were doing it we’d have that more than that one Mr. Heater kerosene heater. That’s an huge line for us. The brand we’ve carried since I was growing up went out of business last year. I think the Mr. Heaters are a great substitute but we’ve got to hit the advertising hard so we don’t miss a beat.
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I really like the lineup of Tuthill pumps that they’ve got on this page. We do amazingly well on that line.
The backpage has tires and batteries. I wish they had done more batteries on that page. I had always thought that we had a real good market share on automotive batteries. We started hitting the batteries in our advertising a bit harder and they really took off. It seems that on batteries that you have to keep the top of mind awareness so that when the customers are ready to buy they already know where to go.
We’re finally seeing progress on our transition of our website from the dot biz site to the dot com.
Today we are transitioning our job applications over to the new dot com. Unfortunately we don’t have a lot of job openings just now. We’re hiring seasonal gift wrappers but that’s about it.
But with the number of people we employ it’s not unlikely to have a new job open up tomorrow. So go ahead and apply today at HomeofEconomy.com.
I used to do nearly all of the hiring in Grand Forks and I while I was skeptical of internet applications when they first were coming in, they really are a great tool for both the job seeker and the company doing the hiring. I don’t do it anymore because they had to give me a job where I couldn’t cause a lot of trouble.
Here’s a real nice commercial covering our winter work boots. We’re trying to get more awareness that if you work outdoors in the winter and have to wear steel toed boots there are some options to help keep your feet warm. (Well wool socks help too).
The work boots we featured have some high quality insulation to keep your feet warmer than a summer boot. But they also have water protection which is really important to keep you comfortable all day.
We also through in some traditional pack boots because we sell a lot of them too. In Grand Forks I’ve been watching the shelves empty and get filled multiple times already. We were talking about wanting to have some pack boots in a December flyer and our buyer was concerned about having enough to sell at that point.
Deer season opens up this weekend in both North Dakota and Minnesota. Here’s our ad to get those last minute shoppers in.
Best of luck to you and be safe. I took my son out for youth season (got our deer up by Walhalla) and won’t be hunting in November.
Here’s a good ad pushing the Carhartt cold weather gear. This is a bit early for using the Carhartt Extremes, but we want to put the idea into people’s heads that when it’s time to buy we’re the place to go.
And it is a good time to buy. Right now we are nearly 100% in stock with the different sizes. We order the stuff every week, but if a large part of the country gets cold Carhartt gets overwhelmed with orders.
We can go deep on our pre-orders because it always gets cold here. But even so with the explosive growth we’ve seen in recent years with our Carhartt gear we don’t know what size is going to take off on us. All we can do is make orders and hope the factory can keep up with us.
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