The Agenda

How small-business issues are shaping politics and policy.

Two years ago, as Charles Kuhn struggled to steer Kopp’s Cycle, the bicycle shop he owns in Princeton, N.J., through a tenuous economic recovery, he noticed that fewer and fewer of the nominal “customers” in his shop were actually buying anything. Instead, he told The Agenda at the time, “People come in with their smartphone and scan a bar code on a product that I have in my showroom, and what comes up on the phone is the three closest places and their price and then also what it is on Amazon.”

The practice is called “showrooming,” and if you’re a retailer, you’re probably familiar with the phenomenon. It is one of the reasons, according to an article in The New York Times published over the weekend, that the bill now making its way through Congress to allow states to force online retailers to collect sales tax from customers may be too late to help many small businesses. But when Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist for The Times, read the article, he had an idea: why not create a script that retailers can use when they spot showroomers scanning the aisles?

Ron’s proposed script goes like this:

I appreciate the value of your dollar, but we are a local retailer bringing vibrancy to this district. If everyone did what you did, we could no longer afford the Main Street rent that those Web retailers do not have to pay, and we’d be out of business. Then this space becomes another chain drugstore or branch of a megabank. Is that what you want?

We also ran the idea by Jay Goltz, our colleague at You’re the Boss and the owner of a picture-frame shop, and he came up with a milder rebuke:

I appreciate the fact that everyone wants to save money; so do I. But I have to tell you, if everyone starts buying everything online, everyone but the online sellers will lose. The local stores will go broke, the online prices will go up, the customers will no longer have anywhere to see the merchandise, and the local neighborhood will be in bad shape. It is a heavy cost for maybe saving a few dollars. Just something to consider.

Something to consider, indeed. But after considering it for a few minutes, Jay decided that he didn’t think “shaming” would work. “It will lead to some really ugly confrontations: ‘You should lower your prices!’ ‘If local retailers weren’t so greedy, it wouldn’t be a problem!’ ‘I can’t afford to spend more!’ I can’t see anything good coming out of it,” he said.

What do you think? We think it’s a worthwhile experiment, and we’d like you to help write the script. Should it provoke guilt? Sympathy? Something else? Please send us your suggestions. We will publish the best of your ideas in a future post.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/finding-the-right-words-to-confront-a-showroomer/?partner=rss&emc=rss