In 1974 the top Radio Shack store manager made a bonus of nearly $150,000 – for running one store for one year. That was real money back then. I asked him what the secret was of his success. He said, ‘I get to the store everyday at 6:00. From 6:00 to 10:00 I do the paperwork, clean the store, count stock, order inventory, and train my people. From the time the store opens until it closes, we sell.’

To be successful he had to do this, because at that time Radio Shack operated 2000 stores nationwide and not one of them had a computer. Managers and salespeople wrote receipts for every sale they made. They asked for and captured the name and address of every customer by hand. At the end of the day, the managers collected the receipts, cash, and charge cards, went into the back room, added up all the receipts, counted all the money, prayed that they matched, filled out a detailed report, dropped the money in the night depository at the bank, and dropped their reports in the mail to the home office. One can only imagine the time and effort required at their headquarters in Ft. Worth, Texas to reenter all of the informa¬tion, distill customer data, and reconcile the reports.
 
Once a week Radio Shack store managers took a physically count of their top 500 inventory items, entered information into their Blue Books (loose leaf binders full of blue tinted sheets), and ordered what they needed based on history and calculated projections. The more ambitious managers also counted and ordered the other 2000 stock-keeping-units – diodes, triodes, transistors, resistors, cable, batteries, and techy stuff on peg-hooks, the sales of which created Schwartzenegger-in-a-Hummer sized gross profits.

Today, some wireless retailers still operate their stores using manual forms. Many have computers and use generic accounting software, that does some of the work, but falls short of satisfying the complex demands of processing wireless transactions. Their best and brightest sales stars become managers and then withdraw into the back rooms to push paper around, instead of focusing on creating immediate, abundant, and profitable sales.

Automate and deploy a retail POS system and get them back on the sales floor where they can make you money again.

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 ©2005 by The Edmond-Howard Network