Rejuvenating Warwick retail

To the editor: Like most Warwick residents, I value our unique downtown shopping environment and wish to see it prosper. I would like to share my thoughts, therefore, as both a concerned Warwick resident and as someone in sales and marketing on improving the business health of the downtown shops. I admit that I was guilty of seeking alternatives to my frequent book-buying with which The Bookstore could not effectively compete. The vast majority of my book purchases are technology books - third-party manuals on design and software programming. I rarely know which book I want without periodic browsing which can take hours of searching and skimming. Could I decide on a title and then order it from The Bookstore? Yes, of course. Immediate gratification and my desire for a simple purchase process, however, consistently prevented it. There was an exception. When The Bookstore hosted Master Doug Cook this summer in a signing of his wonderful new Taekwondo book, I was there making a purchase. Sitting down speaking with Doug and his small gathering of local friends was an experience I couldn’t have had at Barnes & Noble or Amazon. And herein lies the answer to the challenge of the Warwick shops: Provide an experience that cannot be duplicated by Wal-Mart, Middletown or the Internet. Don’t even try to compete on price or selection, especially if you’re selling a commodity. Compete instead on a unique customer experience that brings people back and gets them raving about it to their friends. As a boy, I grew up hanging around my father’s lumber and hardware store in a tiny Midwestern town long before Lowes and Home Depot. Business was relatively easy within that small captured audience. But retail has changed. Having an item in stock and at a fair price is no longer good enough. Neither are lackluster frequent buyer programs or other tired gimmicks. Superstores and the Internet are forcing small town retail to seriously reinvent itself. And chastising people for taking advantage of huge selections and cheaper prices is not the answer. All things equal, most of us like more variety and paying less. So let’s make it an unequal playing field. Stores must provide a unique personal experience that cannot be matched by mega-stores and the Internet. Each store owner has to determine their authentic and consistent competitive identity. Perhaps for a women’s apparel company it’s an additional service that provides color identification to help women know their personal colors, or a unique measuring system to help clothes look great regardless of the figure. Perhaps for a furniture store, it’s the aroma of rich cedar circulating throughout the store while people gather for refreshments lounging on samples of the store’s comfy merchandise. And perhaps its just product quality, customer service and attention to detail that is so remarkable that we crave being in that establishment. Look no further than our own Zana D restaurant as an outstanding example. Wonderful jazz, high Greenwich Village-like brick walls, great food and an authentically caring wait staff have culminated into what appears to be a well-deserved burgeoning Warwick business. I don’t want to see boarded up windows, “for rent” signs and any other indications of a withering demand for the downtown Warwick shopping district. But, the answer lies not in our disdain for Wal-Mart, Middletown and the Internet - they’re not going anywhere because they have a place in our lives. Instead, the answer lies in the Warwick retail shops offering a one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable customer experience that wins the hearts and wallets of Orange County residents and beyond. Michael Lake Redlake, Inc. Warwick