Cart and Kiosk Success Blog

Operating more than one cart

By Joe Francis

 

I n 2000 I decided to expand my cart business and do multiple carts. We did 2 carts in California, one in Reno, NV and 3 in Connecticut. This was the year that I learned a lot about the people you pick to partner with and the importance of who you put in charge at any of your carts. This is not a problem you run into until you decide It is better you want to do more than one cart.

This was the second year we sold Bungee Balls. The thing about this product is that you cannot go back to the same mall that you sold in the first year as the area gets saturated and the sales crash after selling one season.

I happened to pick a mall that was in between two locations where the bungee ball had been sold before. The end result of that was the sales were very soft to begin with but I stuck things out in that mall and still profited $10,000 almost two months although I would have liked to make a lot more.

I partnered with my wife-to-be on the mall in Reno, NV. My wife had always done with anything that she sold plus she is driven to accomplish things and can handle other people as well. She did extremely well at her cart at this mall and was the highest grossing cart and profit out of all the ones I was involved with.

An older friend of mine ran the other cart we did in California and while we did very well working together the first year on our first cart he was not strong enough organizationally to handle running the cart on his own and even though he started out much stronger than me in the mall that I was running I passed him in the end.

Connecticut is where I really did not do well. I partnered with a friend of mine who I had known for some time. She did well in the mall that she ran directly but we barely broke even in one of the other malls and lost some money in the third mall. Plus, this was clear across the country and wasn’t able to go there to handle why things were not going as well as they should. The two malls that did not do so well also were questionable to start with as to whether they were good picks. One had a fairly low amount of body the traffic and the second did not have a great amount of traffic in the location we were given plus this mall did not have the type of customers we wanted for our product. Last, we had continuous trouble with one of the managers of the carts we owned and so no matter what we did we could not get the sales to increase as they should.

So a lot of new lessons were learned this second year and they were as follows:

·         It is better to sell a product that doesn’t saturate after one holiday season. You spend a lot of time finding a mall to sell in and building relationships with people in the mall and to have to turn around and do this all over each year wastes a lot of time.

·         Make sure when you take a new mall that it has the type of customers that buy your product, i.e. this can be a lot of kids, or a certain economic class. The point is to make sure you know who buys your product and that your mall has these types of people in them.

·         If you are going to expand and pick multiple malls ensure that you can get to these malls to visit them during the holiday season as well as being able to handle while they are not doing well.

·         Only partner with people who have shown that they are successful at the things they take on. If you don’t already know this about a person ask questions that will determine this.

·         You are better off not taking an additional mall if you do not have a competent manager to run it. If you have a bad manager running a mall you will wish you never took it plus it will take your attention away from the malls that are doing well.

·         Last, a bad manager in a good mall will do badly. A good manager in a bad mall will often do well.  The characteristics of a good manger include the ability to sell to people; the ability to handle others and get them to work; someone who is responsible, shows up on time, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

Wecome to the Cart and Kiosk Success Blog

Welcome to my introductory blog concerning being successful in the cart and kiosk business in malls.

I started selling sunglasses outdoors in 1996. I was succeeding at this and doing well but the sunglass business had a season to it. We would start in April and end around the end of August.  After a few years of doing this I wanted to find something that would “fill in” the rest of the year as I wanted to continue making money throughout the year.

In 1999 a fellow sunglass friend showed me information he received about selling the “bungee ball” at carts in malls. This seemed interesting to me and a possible way to fill the winter void. We went and got trained and started selling bungee balls at the Mission Viejo Mall in Mission Viejo, CA right before Thanksgiving of that year.

Needless to say, as this was a new adventure for me or my friend we were nervous about breaking into the cart and kiosk business. No one wants to start something new and be unsuccessful.  But we had done a lot of homework regarding the bungee ball itself and saw that the product had sold well in many malls. We also researched thoroughly a lot of malls in the Southern California area and we saw that the Mission Viejo Mall had a lot of potential even though it had just gone through a major renovation.

I sat down and asked myself before we started what was the worst that could happen? The answer to that question is that I could spend 6 weeks of my time to try something new and break even. I decided it was worth the risk.

So we were off to the races! We learned an awful lot that year about the cart business. We learned about hiring people, how to get insurance for what we were doing, how to deal with vendors trying to knock off and sell the same product you were selling, etc. When we wrapped things up December 31 my partner and I had both put about $12,000-$13,000 in each of our pockets.

This is what I would consider were the most important things I learned that first season that set the stage for being successful in the cart and kiosk.

• Research and find a product that seems interesting to you and make sure that it is a good product with decent quality. Do not try and sell a product that is not good quality as even though you may make some money with it this will cause you a lot of problems and you won’t be welcome back to that mall again afterwards either by customers or the mall management itself.
• When you find a product research how it has sold in many malls around the country and reassure yourself that the product itself has good potential.  Find out about the type of malls the product did not do well in so that you don’t end up taking that same kind of mall in your own area.
• If this is the first time you have sold at a cart or kiosk in a mall it is imperative that you get involved with the business yourself and dive in and get your hands dirty. Selling at a mall cart is not something that you want to hire someone else to do for you and then hope for the best. You need to understand how this business works first yourself before you can do multiple carts selling the same item.
• Ensure that you research the malls in the area where you are and that you know what the customer is for your product so that you can decide if the mall you are going into has that type of customer there. Things I will take a look at in deciding on a mall is the sales per square foot in that mall (this figure will vary from mall to mall and its importance will depend on what item you are selling), what the household income is around the mall and also the number of visitors per year coming to the mall. I will also go to the mall on busy weekend days and count the traffic that goes by the various locations being proposed to me by the mall to see which locations are the busiest. How much the mall will charge you for rent is important and just because a mall has low rent for the holiday season does not make it a good mall. Conversely, just because a mall has high rent during the holiday does not make it a bad mall. But you should research enough malls in a given area to ensure that you aren’t being ripped off by a mall that you want to go into.
• If you are going into a mall for the first time or are selling a product for the first time treat this as a learning experience and do not put pressure on yourself to make a gazillion dollars the first time out. If you go out there and try your best and don’t get down about things that can occur more than likely you will meet with some success. Having said that the cart and kiosk business is not for the faint of heart. This is your own business and you need to treat it like a business, i.e. showing up on time, working hard, etc. The rewards are great but the work is hard- often much harder than being an employee but on the other hand the rewards are much greater.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this blog on cart and kiosk success.