Antiques Journal: In My Opinion

A few years ago I wrote a column arguing that the discount was the bane of the antiques business. Oh dear, have I had to change my tune! These days, it appears that anything that is personal and not purchased frequently (like groceries) can only be sold if discounted. Antiques included. But a single word, “discount” covers a lot of ground and takes many different forms.

The discounts we do
Traditionally in our business, a discount has been negotiated privately at the point of sale. If a customer asks for it, it can serve as a “closer,” and some customers enjoy the negotiations that finally reach agreement on the amount the discount should be. But then there are customers who take this enjoyment to extremes and try to beat the dealer down to the point where the margin left on the item doesn’t cover the cost of doing business, even if it exceeds, fractionally, the cost of goods. In the sort of recession that we’re pulling out of, dealers in need of cash flow have all too often allowed themselves to be beaten down to the bone.

I hate this sort of discounting: It does the dealer no good; it does the business no good. All it does, presumably, is make the customer feel good because he or she has “won.” And that’s the problem. This sort bargaining assumes an adversarial relationship between dealer and customer; it assumes that the dealer has engaged in price-gouging and is out to bilk ignorant customers. It assumes, in other words, that the dealer is a rogue who is not to be trusted. A No Sale would be better for all concerned.

Dealers who engage in this sort of negotiation, however reluctantly, harden these harmful and false assumptions. Making a sale under these conditions is promoting exactly the wrong image for the antiques business and it establishing exactly the wrong relationship with the customer. Let’s all make a collective resolution never to engage in this sort of discounting. Just say “No,” and walk away.

So what sort of discounting is good? Let’s get one thing clear, even though it may be counterintuitive, discounting is not about price. Very, very rarely does a discount bring an antique across that invisible line dividing the affordable from the unaffordable. If an antique is out of reach at $1,000, it’s not going to become affordable at $900. Put it the other way, if a customer can pay $900 for it, he or she can afford $1,000. It’s not the dollars that count: It’s the discount that counts.

A discount politely requested and willingly given sets up a good feeling between customer and dealer: It creates a transaction in which both parties feel they’ve been fairly treated. Mutual, not adversarial. In the antiques business, dealers have long used fair discounting to build relationships with customers and, equally, to offer special rewards to regular customers. The critical thing is that the asking price must be a dealer’s honest assessment of an antique’s current value, not an inflated one. Customers can tell. In these conditions, a reasonable discount is a positive thing for both parties.

The discounts we don’t
We antiques dealers tend to use discounts only at the point of sale. We also make them private and personal. That makes us dinosaurs in the retail business. All other retailers use discounts as incentives. An incentive discount is not used as a way of selling an item in which the customer is already interested. An incentive discount, often in huge red letters, is used to create that interest. Incentive discounts are also used to attract attention and to draw people in: If it’s the discount that counts, then the discount is the main attraction.

Until very recently, incentive discounting has been a big No-No in the antiques business, probably because it was seen to cheapen our merchandise, or even to create unhealthy competition among dealers. Show promoters have typically prohibited dealers from marking items “20% off” or, even worse, from hanging a sign in the booth “15% off everything! Saturday and Sunday only!!” We were at one show some years ago where a dealer stood outside his booth and buttonholed passers-by, “Forget the price tags, everything’s discounted!” Other dealers complained, including us, and the promoter told him to shut up, and did not invite him back next year.

Should we now rethink our attitudes to him? Or even join him rather than silence him? Surely not; that would merely lower the tone of the show! Yet Lisa is often mailed incentive discounts from very tony clothing stores. And they’ve been known to draw her into the store without, as far as I can see, lowering the tone of the place at all. Hang it all, Tiffany’s offers incentive discounts. It’s not the incentive discount per se that is objectionable, but the way it is presented.

In the antiques business, many of the more retail-oriented group shops already use incentive discounts: “Customer Appreciation Week, 10% off everything” or “Mothers’ Day Sale,” or what have you. Advertising the sale as a sale, the discount as a discount, draws customers into the store, and it draws them in with the intention of buying: The customer who has been drawn into the store by an incentive discount is more likely to buy than one who just wanders in off the street.

In the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a small but increasing number of dealers advertising sales in their shops, or more often, on their websites. Sometimes they offer an across-the-board discount, sometimes the discount is calculated for each item, and sometimes it is applied only to selected items. Last year, we offered a limited term, selected-items sale on our website. And you know what? It worked. We made sales; we made our regular customers happy; and, importantly, we converted some lurkers to buyers. (“Lurkers” are the majority of the regular visitors to your website who never contact you and never buy: You never know who they are, and they appear to exist only on your webstats. Nonetheless, they are valuable, because they are your best single source of potential new buyers.) We limited our sale to a month, but we needn’t have done: People were so keen for the bargains that they were almost all sold within the first week.

Now imagine the unimaginable: A show promoter and dealers agreeing that everything in the show will be 15 percent off its regular price. Every tag would show the regular price and the discount. Then imagine the show being promoted on its discount: “Antiques Show. 15% off everything, Saturday and Sunday only.” (Pssst! 15 percent might be quite close to the discounts that dealers would have offered under the old system!) Of course, there would be no further discounting at the point of sale. Of course, dealers would have to be honest about the regular price of each item. And, of course, customers would have to believe them. Is all that too much to imagine?

If that sticks in your craw as being too close to used car salesmanship, would discount coupons be more discreet? “Present this coupon and receive 15% off any antique in participating dealers’ booths.” And on the floor, the participating dealers would display a tasteful sign, “Discount Coupons Welcome.” The coupons would be mailed by the promoter and printable from the show website. Now, you show dealers, if you were exhibiting at a show where the promoter offered such a scheme, would you be one of the participating dealers or not? And why? If you were not, and you were between two dealers who were, how would you feel?

If you are a sales-oriented dealer at a show, you could run such a scheme on your own, and nobody except you and your customers would know about it. Put a down-loadable coupon on your website, email it to your customer list: “15% off everything in our booth.” Or, more cunningly, “15% off everything marked with a green dot.” Then when regular show-goers ask what the green dot means, you tell them it’s a discount for regular customers only, but if they sign up for your newsletter, they can be treated as one. You may not make a sale, but at least you’re building your mailing list.

Now, importantly, what about you buyers out there? Would you like to receive a discount coupon? Would it draw you into a show or a shop that otherwise you would have ignored? In a show, would you make a beeline for the participating dealers, and ignore the others? Do you think incentive discounts would make you feel that the tone of the show was being lowered?

Behind all these questions lies the larger one of whether customers would like the antiques business to be more like the retail business in general, or whether they cherish our traditional, quieter ways of doing business. I’d love to have some feedback here (johnfiske@verizon.net). In advance of that feedback, my gut sense is telling me that any resistance to changing the way we do business is more likely to come from dealers than from customers.