Despite all that has happened with the economy over the last eight or so years one thing has continued to remain: The desire by consumers to purchase items on credit—especially when it comes to large ticket items such as flooring.
Throughout my career as a retail sales advisor, manufacturer representative, and educational writer for the flooring industry, I’ve worked hard not to use negatives about my competition to influence a purchase in my direction.
The buying groups, marketing groups or whatever they’re called these days in the floor covering industry have been an extremely valuable adjunct to the business.
As flooring manufacturers, distributors, dealers, contractors and installers have likely found out, their job is not done when the end-customer purchases a floor and the installer installs it—far from it.
I get it’s been at least a month since the “60 Minutes” story broke about Lumber Liquidators, but don’t think for a minute this news is going to disappear, not with the publically traded national chain store fighting back the allegations combined with lawsuits alleging, among other things, insider trading.