Here's a recycled column ... on furniture trade-ins!
Jerry Epperson -- Furniture Today, February 23, 2003
It's interesting to look at newspaper furniture advertisements from the first half of the last century. Some ads from the 1920s and 1930s show how important appliances were to most furniture stores. They created traffic and the all-important credit sale.
You also see another element that has disappeared: trade-ins. They gave the consumer equity when making a replacement purchase, fostering a feeling that furniture retains value.
Trade-ins also helped solve a huge problem that exists today: What do we do with our old stuff? After all, our challenge today is, in most cases, to convince folks to replace items, not fill a need.
How often would you trade autos if all you could do with your old car was donate it to Goodwill? If you're like most folks, you would keep it until it loses any possible use, just like consumers do with furniture.
I probably AM not a typical consumer in this regard. I have kept one of my cars, a 1969 Camaro convertible, for 33 years, and I tend to replace my furniture every three or four years.
The key to my being able to buy new furniture is my sister-in-law, Jackie. She has a huge, lovely home on the top of a mountain in western Virginia, and takes any of our old furniture. Needless to say, going to her house makes me feel very much at home.
Most consumers do not have my solution. And most want to think their furniture is worth something. You sell furniture for a living. Would you want to sell used furniture as an individual, without a store, using either a classified ad, a yard sale or word-of-mouth among friends?
Most people do not want to go through something like that, especially if it means having strangers come into their home to see the merchandise. The solution? Use it until it's broken, give it to your kids (if they'll take it) or keep it until it magically transforms into an "antique."
At the American Furniture Manufacturers Assn. meeting in November, a hot topic was developing a market for used furniture. Coincidentally, in the greater Phoenix area where AFMA's convention was held, Terri's Consign & Design in Tempe is one of our nation's best retailers of used furniture, part of a chain with stores in Phoenix, San Diego, Las Vegas and Atlanta.
Terri's has developed a sophisticated system to help furniture stores make money from trade-ins, and they exhibited in the National Home Furnishings Assn.'s Retailer Resource Center at the October market. This chain and others around the nation are quietly developing an old concept whose time may have come (again).
By the way, if this column sounds familiar, we did a similar one on trade-ins back on July 10, 1995! Columns can't be traded in, but they can be recycled.
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