6 ms·
Ask HN: Has anyone opened a physical store?
Everything that we do and talk about is digital. I'm just curious to know if anyone has run or managed a physical store for books, coffee, a restaurant, anything really.
- tomcam 3y agoEverything you listed is incredibly challenging, expensive, and subject to multiple disasters. For example, you normally need to sign a 5 year lease. Lose your business after 6 months? You’re still on the hook for another 54 rent payments of $2,000/month or whatever. (HN readers in Alpharetta, Georgia will gasp at rent that high. Readers in San Jose will laugh at how naïvely low that number is.) Local, county, and state compliance takes months to understand and you will make expensive mistakes, period. The air conditioner compressor will need replacing at the worst possible time. Your outlets might be 6” off and need reinstalling because the previous tenant was grandfathered in. Permitting will cost way more than you thought. If you’re lucky, it will only be 1000 or so extra dollars. If you’re in a highly regulated city, you may be off by $10-$15,000. You may even have to sign hire someone else just to handle the permitting for certain infrastructure improvements. No matter how many times you try to ask city officials what’s gonna come up next because do you want to anticipate the permit issues, they will claim ignorance, or fail the answer completely. Insurance will be expensive or just not available in some cases. Your parking lot seemed pretty big but you’ll learn there aren’t enough ADA-compliant spaces. The dude you hire to resurface the parking lot might claim to understand ADA requirements but forget about them—or just disappear with your 50% down. Six months later he’ll call you after rehab looking for work because he’ll have forgotten he ripped you off. I promise that if you survive to the point of getting to hire people they’ll disappear without warning or have a breakdown if misgendered. They’ll be shocked to the point of resigning if the Sysco truck is 3 hours late they’ll need to stay too restock and miss a watch party with their friends. Your most reliable cashier will do fine for a year and a half. Her car will break down, she’ll ask for an advance to get it fixed and you’ll readily give it, feeling good about yourself. Then she’ll ask you in another month, then two weeks after that, and you’ll find yourself reluctantly telling her you aren’t an ATM. She will guilt you about it and maybe complain to her coworkers, who will also ask for advances. You probably won’t have the two hours a week needed for bookkeeping and will underestimate your taxes by a lot. You’ll walk in one day and find business down by 40% because of Yelp review bombing or a competitor reporting your business as closed permanently. That will take multiple days to fix because Google and Yelp don’t give af. You will learn that by Federal law pipes always burst at 5:00PM on a Friday, thus requiring you to seek out and pay for a plumber after hours. If you hire someone to do filing they will silently change your system, then quit when you bring it up to them no matter how nicely.
- ano88888 3y agogood reality check. Shit is difficult
- rossdavidh 3y agoWell, my wife has. It is 19 years old now, and sells goth and punk clothing. It turns out that decent spreadsheets matter for her business a lot more than her website.
- bruceb 3y agoAre the clothes new or 2nd hand/vintage? If new how does she survive against chains and internet retailers?
- rossdavidh 3y agoBoth. The key insight is that the store, is a place that people want to go. Buying something, is an excuse to go there. She likes to have good stuff, quality at a good price, but people don't think "hey I need a t-shirt", and then go there to get one. They think, "hey I want to go to that cool store that has a vibe I like", and once there, they see a t-shirt (or whatever) that they like, and they buy it to support the store, because they want it to be there in the future. The same thing applies, btw, to independent coffeeshops, bookstores, game stores, etc. The store, the location to go to, is what people want most. Buying stuff there is a way to support it, and you get something for that money as a bonus. You don't donate to the local public radio station in order to get the t-shirt or sticker or CD or whatever they're giving as a bonus; you donate in order to keep the radio station around, and then as a bonus you get a thing. Local independent stores are kind of like that. Which means, that they need to have a welcoming vibe that you enjoy, just being there.
- asim 3y agoCan I ask about the actual viability and profit margins on something like this? It feels like physical retail is a hard business. My father owned a cornershop selling papers, magazines, sweets, etc. It was tough.
- rossdavidh 3y agoSorry for the slow reply. Physical retail is definitely a hard business, albeit one less prone to winner-take-all than online retail.
- paulcole 3y agoYes, was in charge of opening a yoga studio/event space in Portland, OR about a decade ago. It sucked.
- kleer001 3y agoNo, but I know enough to stay the hell away from that cluster fuck orchard of nonsense.
- getwiththeprog 3y agoRent is the killer, it really stifles displaying new ideas in public. And having to be there every day, what a way to live.