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My uncle ran a hardware store in Dayton for 31 years and what he said about loyal customers keeps bugging me
I grabbed lunch with him a couple weeks back because he finally retired and sold the building on 3rd Street. He said he lost maybe 40 regulars over three decades, and when I asked why, he pulled out a notebook where he tracked it, address by address. Almost none of them left over price, he said. Most left the one time he ran out of something and didn't bother to call them when it came back in. It hit different because I've been buying the same coffee brand for 8 years and I can't name one person there who would notice if I stopped showing up. Maybe loyalty isn't really about the product at all, it's about somebody keeping track of you. Curious if anyone here has a spot they stick with mostly because a person there knows their name.
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lunakim5d ago
The notebook part is what gets me, but I gotta push back on one thing. You said almost none left over price, and maybe that's true for his store, but I don't think that means price doesn't matter at all. It probably means the people who cared about price already stopped coming years ago, so by the time he wrote their name down they were past that. What was left in the notebook was the folks who stuck around long enough to care about something else, and then that something else is what broke it. So yeah, the call when the part came in mattered more than the price, but only for the people still standing there. The ones who left over a few bucks never made it into his book in the first place, so his count is a little lopsided. Still, the main point holds. The running out isn't the problem, it's the not calling that does it. That part I believe all the way.
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