Retail Observer

RETAILOBSERVER.COM JANUARY 2017 72 B ack in the 1990s I was working for a well-known and well-established New England chain of Audio/Video/ Appliance stores as their VP of Electronics Merchandising. At one point, we had acquired a famous single-store business in Springfield, Massachusetts. Locally, the store was known as H.O.T., short for House of Television. Prior to opening this location, we spent time cleaning, remodeling and merchandising H.O.T. to conform to the look of our other stores. The basement contained a no-longer-functional service department. We had a young man, David, who was our primary warehouse and stockman for this location. I asked David to fully gut and clean the contents of the former service department as we no longer needed it. Hours later, David was walking around on the sales floor with a small cylindrical glass object in his hand. He held it out toward me and asked, "Jim, what is this? " Amused but understanding how he might not know wat it was I replied, "That's a vacuum tube. Years ago, tubes were an integral component in radios and televisions…until they were replaced by transistors." He looked at the tube in his hand and then up at me. He said, "What's a transistor? " In the seventies and eighties, Sony and Panasonic duked it out for consumer video recording format dominance. Sony burst on the scene with its iconic Betamax system. It was good; it was very good. One problem though. The main attraction to home video recording was the idea of time-shifting. Being able to watch a program when you wanted to watch it. Betamax could only record up to 60 minutes on one cassette. That's fine if you were recording an episode of MASH or 60-Minutes. But a movie, nope. Nothing doing. Panasonic comes along and says, "Two hours? No problem; we'll just slow the tape down a bit, (sacrifice a tad of quality) and bingo, here's your 2-hour format." It was an instant hit. Sony tried to counter with a silly cartridge changer. At the end of one tape, the machine would eject it and replace with another. It didn't work very well and people didn't like it. So, the inferior quality system won out. The compact disc gained enormous popularity in the eighties. It quickly put the audio cassette and the vinyl LP out of business. It was more convenient, sounded great and was fully portable. Portability as a trend had already begun years prior with the advent of the "Boom Box" using the Philips cassette. The CD not only exponentially grew the category of portable audio but also drove players to downsize, become more compact themselves. The compact audio player gained in popularity not only as portable devices but also in the home. The large stationary audio systems were replaced by much smaller "shelf" systems taking up less space. The trade off; sound quality. The bookshelf systems sounded "ok" but not nearly as rich, bold and dynamic as their forerunners. Style and simplicity took precedence over performance. Another more modern version of such trends is the comparison between LCD and plasma screen televisions. Plasma emerged as the higher quality display without a doubt. Colors were richer, deeper and contrast was wildly superior over the LCD panel. But as LCD began to catch up to some degree in performance combined with lower production costs it eventually won out. Try to buy a plasma TV today. So, you might ask, "What's the point of this stroll down memory lane? " I suppose there are at least two. 1. We often forget that people who are not of similar age to ourselves cannot relate to outdated technology. While perhaps to some its interesting, to most, its unimportant. That's just a philosophical point of view. The more meaningful point to all of this is; 2. The value of convenience. To those of us who grew up in the consumer electronics business it's sometimes hard to fathom why anyone would give up superior performance for conven- ience. Yet, it's a historical fact. At least in our society, convenience and value trumps performance almost every time. Think about your business. Is it providing convenience and value to consumers in your market? Jim Sendrak Consumer Electronic Trends Jim Sendrak, EVP Electronics & Marketing, MEGA Group USA RO POWER OF CONVENIENCE

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