The Difficulty of Spending Money in Bulgaria – The Timberland Store
During the process of shoe shopping I also visited a Timberland outlet store. Timberland took a different approach to Reebok in their goal of not making sales. Rather than make the shoes easy to peruse and trying them on difficult, Timberland did the opposite. They offered plenty of places to try the shoes on, but made the shoes inaccessible. By inaccessible I mean that all the shoes were displayed behind the sales counter. The store was quite large and had a decent selection of clothes on the floor, but the shoes were behind the counter – nearly all of them. The counter wasn’t that big, but they had managed to cram nearly every shoe in the store into that tiny space. In fact, all I could really see of any shoe was the heel. They mine as well have been behind bars.
As a casual shopper I’m not going to make any impulse buys on something that requires me to go through the hassle of finding a salesperson (usually a whole blog story in and of itself) and asking them to let me see a few shoes from behind the counter. Of course, it’s also difficult to judge shoes based on just the design of the heel.
I know shoplifting in Sofia might be higher than the average European city, but not selling anything can also be a hindrance to the average business. Although, the more time I spend in Sofia, the more I realize that selling product is relatively far down in importance. A few things I have found to be more important than profit for Bulgarian businesses are:
a) Number of items for sale. Empirical evidence tends to show “less is better”.
b) Number of mannequins in the window. More is better on this one – ideally the entire storefront window should be packed with mannequins, even if they aren’t wearing anything.
c) Outrageousness of sales staff’s clothing and hair coloring. The “best” stores have sales staff in one-piece spandex zebra-print suits, knee-high boots and the brightest red hair coloring you can imagine.
These business practices amazingly seem to work. Businesses that never have any customers (as far as I can tell), but have only a few items in the store in the store, several undressed mannequins in the window and a crazily dressed sales person remain in business month after month. Perhaps there is some unique arbitrage opportunity related to mannequins that I am unaware of…
