Start Your Own Thrift Store?
After six years in association with the thrift store business, we're still amazed at how many thrift stores go out of business in their first year. Some may fail because of poor location or bad timing but for the most part it seems that store operators are simply not sufficiently prepared for what lies aheads once the doors open for the first time. How to Start a Thrift store provides much of what is needed to get off to a good start.
As software providers to the thrift industry, we spend a fair amount of time communicating with store owners, so over time we've become aware of the many complexities and day-to-day challenges. Those who go it alone surely have their hands full but then we haven't seen much evidence that hiring help simplifies matters. Nevertheless, our guide also gets into employee management and our Diamond software Edition provides useful tools for managing employees like credit-purchase, software restrictions and commission tracking.
How to Start Your Own Thrift Store
How to Start a Thrift Business is (73) 8.5" x 11" Pages containing over 22,000 words of advice and information. It covers legal preparation, insurance, computer programs and hardware typically used in the consignment business, forms, agreements, certificates and even a sample sales invoice (fashioned after the Excel spreadsheet). From beginning to end, deciding on a name to paying settlements, this guide (printed or in ebook form) tends to every detail of operation.
Surprisingly it seems that the primary reason why thrift stores (and other businesses for that matter) fail (quickly) is because the store operator was insufficiently prepared. Attempts at running a thrift store seem to be often undertaken by those who can afford to fail - give ti a shot - see what happens - more like a hobby. While that may sound a bit terse, spending a day on the phone with folks 'in the business' of thrift store management will underscore our observation - people are trying to function in a business they don't understand. Hence some time ago we started making notes of all the things that one should know before venturing into the fray and that was the birth of Opening and Running a Thrift Shop.
Anyone who purchases Best Consignment Shop Program has received a free copy of our book along with a free listing for their shop in the Consigment Shops n Stores Directory. The latter has proven to be a good value to stores because stores listed in the Directory appear at the top of search results for terms related to consignment and their location. The guide itself also includes free sample of agreements, gift certificates, coupons and check-in forms.
Just a word of advice: Computer programs for consignment operations can cost $600 over a 10-year period, or more than $13,000 - for essentially the same features. 'Consignpro' falls into the 'expensive for no reason' category and also uses a less reliable Microsoft Access database which is known to lose data and crash. Avoid those vendors who are basically one programmer because when he goes, so does your software.
