Don't Forget the Stocking Stuffers ...

Can you imagine being a 30 year old entrepreneur and seeing your entire livelihood jumpstart off of a product as small as a matchbox car?  Can you imagine that one day your product would be essentially relegated to a split-second purchase as the customer is leaving the store?  Your product takes less than two square feet of floor space in an 80,000 square foot mega-store, but has been profitable much longer than most other items in the store ... and yet it's the last thing a customer thinks about.


Don't forget the value of that space at the checkout.  Wrigley's has been making its fortune from those few valuable inches of space and last-second purchases for over a century.  The company has a fascinating history (gum was a gift item packaged with baking powder, but soon became more popular than the powder!) ... see here for more on that company.

It's not enough to cram an entire store full of merchandise, you have to pull those last dollars out of the sale at the checkout.  Major boxes have done this for years, but small businesses typically don't or overdo it.

Take a page out of their playbooks this holiday season.  Use the checkout area of the store as a way to remind shoppers to pick up small gifts of thanks for teachers, doctors, bus drivers, mail carriers, etc, or better yet use the space to provide stocking stuffer super buys!  Those extra couple of dollars per customer can amount to percentages in profits come December 31!