Same-day delivery pays big dividends for City
By Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, September 15, 2003
Tamarac, Fla. — City Furniture's move to same-day delivery in the hotly competitive Southeast Florida market is paying off for the Top 100 company.
The retailer began testing and rolling out the service about a year ago and started marketing it in June. Today, its customers can make purchases until 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday and until 3 p.m. on Sundays and get their furniture in their homes the same night.
While 13-store City is up against great competition like Rooms To Go and El Dorado — the latter also touting same-day service — City President Keith Koenig knows of no others committing to delivery of goods bought so late in the day on weekdays and Saturday. And soon it plans to stretch those deadlines to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and to 6 p.m. on Sunday.
"We expected this would drive a 10% same-store sales increase, and it has well exceeded that," Koenig said.
He gives credit to Jim McIngvale, owner of Houston-based Gallery Furniture, and his team "for networking with us and benchmarking with us." The two retailers have been meeting for years, sometimes in Florida, where McIngvale has been interested largely in City's distribution center operations, and sometimes in Texas, where City was eager to learn from the king of same-day delivery.
"It's taken an enormous amount of work, not only having the right facility and the right equipment, but having very efficient computer systems that are talking to each other from point of sale through routing and scheduling to our warehouse management systems," Koenig said.
It has also taken what he called "the best team of service technicians in the furniture industry" delivering the goods. And most critically, City has to have the right furniture in stock all the time — easy to say, but hard to do unless all the other systems are in place.
The reward has been double-digit sales increases for the retailer, and Koenig predicts business will pick up even more in the fourth quarter.
What's more, Koenig said City's customer satisfaction ratings have skyrocketed since the delivery program was instituted, which he said shows improvement in several areas.
"I think our team is working better than ever, our showrooms have never looked better," he said. "But same-day delivery seven days a weak is clearly and important part of the equation."
