Sharpening the Sword is a regular column by retailer John Riley of Grasshopper's Comics, a 1300 square foot comic and game store in Williston Park, New York.  This week, Riley gives us part three of his three part series on inter-store competition.

Well, I've spoken about inter-store competition for two weeks now and even while thinking about the topic I almost made a big mistake.  You see when I first heard about the Dark Tower Midnight Release promotion my first reaction was, 'why bother?'  I honestly didn't think anyone would be coming out at midnight, certainly my customers weren't going to.  But my Store Manager had confidence in it and wanted to go for it.  Since it was his night to close anyway, I told him if he wanted to stay until midnight that was fine with me.

He knew what he was doing, and I learned a lot from him last week.

We didn't have a huge crowd, under twenty people showed up (which was a lot more than I had expected!)  Most were Stephen King fans swept up in the excitement of the release and who hadn't been to a comic shop before, or hadn't been in one for years.  A few were comic fans who shopped at other stores that had decided not to participate in the promotion.  But very importantly, they were all people who had never been to our store before.

This was an incredible opportunity arranged and executed entirely by Marvel and Diamond.  They were literally sending new people to my store and yet I was thinking about not participating?  What was I thinking?  We are constantly asking publishers to do outreach to the general public and here it was!

So how does this apply to our discussions on competition?  Well, I'm in the New York metro market and yet we were one of only two stores that decided to participate.  Most of the people who called us during the week leading up to the promotion made a point of telling us that we were one of the only stores in the area participating.  And they honestly couldn't understand why their stores were essentially forcing them to come to us!  It's when I heard them say that that I realized that not participating wasn't even an option for us.  While I don't expend any energy trying to steal customers from other stores, I certainly don't want to send my customers to other stores unnecessarily. 

Last week I said that the key to competing was in constant small improvements that added up to make you the leader in your market, the store to which others are compared.  In this case, by simply participating in a promotion that everyone else decided to ignore we positioned our store as the leader in our market, if only for those people who were interested in that particular promotion. 

And the part about 'if only for those people who were interested in that particular promotion' is the important part.  When I was just starting out another store owner gave me some very good advice.  He said, 'Remember, EVERY title is someone's favorite.'  Take this out a little further, and you can see that what one person values in coming to your store may not be what another values.   And that's another reason why the 'constant small improvements' strategy works so well.  Because by focusing on constant improvements across the board, you have a much better chance of impacting the greatest number of customers.   Yes, your store is going to have areas in which it specializes, but by seeking to make constant improvements in every area, you have the greatest chance of making the most customers happy.

I hope you've found some ideas in these past few articles to think about and hopefully make a difference in your store.  For us, over the past few years this has become part of our store's culture.  We're not perfect at it, but it's something that we try to do every day.  In fact, since I've started this series of articles two weeks ago I've already made five long-term improvements in our store's communication tools, which we had just overhauled a month ago.  After all, it's better to be the innovator than the guy trying to catch up.