We are in a painful, yet rewarding economic and political transition. These challenging times will pass, with the experience forcing all of us to reassess our core values. In many ways, we are asking: What is truly important in our personal and professional lives?
Yes, we are more skeptical, even cynical. Why?: The greed-based betrayals of Wall Street, the vacating of fiduciary responsibility, failure of political institutions and an an individual and collective abandonment of acting for the greater good.
The skepticism is healthy, helping us reorder life’s priorities. With discovery and delight, more people recognize our personal successes cannot be attained if we fail to serve as our brothers and sisters’ keepers.
The furniture industry will do well in reassessing its core values, purpose and mission. From all quarters, top to bottom, bottom to top, and side to side, the change is long overdue.
Again, a new year brings us to our senses, as we need to create a more acute new ear to hear and clear vision to see how working for the greater good opens opportunities for personal possibilities. We are only as good as the garden in which we are growing.
As I do every six months, I repost a resonating blogservation under the rubric:
SACRED RESPONSIBILITY OF FURNISHING PEOPLE'S HOMES
With renewed surprise, it seems many furniture retailers and manufacturers keep rediscovering a verity: Consumers actually affect the nature and quality of their business.
Likewise, in virtually every industry conference, seminar and workshop — directly and indirectly — during the past several years, at least one session devotes itself to “listening” to consumers. More astounding perspicacity.
Over the years, all the millions of dollars invested in apparently redundant studies and superfluous research about consumers’ attitudes about shopping for furniture seems to be a misallocation of resources.
Most of the findings are always the same. JUST IN, BREAKING NEWS!: People, also known as consumers, dislike the furniture shopping experience for all the reasons known: blind item, inability to discern value, no quality benchmarks, logistical frustrations, lack of professionalism, yada, yada, yada.
Incidentally, the more important research —valuable ethnographic insights — on how people use, buy and think about furniture is absent from pervasive access to be of real significance.
As mentioned, consumers, who pay the bills for the furniture industry, repeatedly respond to researchers with unambiguous declarations (fulminations) of frustration and disgust about their furniture shopping experience. In many stores, consumer-respondents say they want and deserve honest treatment and respect.
H-m-m-m, maybe some kind a problem (for the optimists: an enshrouded opportunity) really exists?
If not, why would so many people voluntarily speak out? Only to get a better deal? To wait until Y3K to pay? To exult in blowout prices? To praise clever advertisements that expect people to become mercantile lemmings and just buy without as much as a sentence about living more comfortably? Not likely.
Should anybody in the industry really express surprise and incredulity that consumers are actually sincere, and that they are deadly serious about furnishing their homes? That they want to live comfortably?
What other reason would people want retailers to practice a mercantile Golden Rule in the marketplace: Do not do unto others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you. That means no tricks, no gimmicks and no phony discounts and all the supporting blandishments that characterize and taint the industry.
Given the industry’s avowed desire for building lasting relationships in the marketplace, a powerful question comes to mind: What is the real purpose of being in the furniture business, anyway?
If the simple, reflexive answer is only to make a profit, perhaps that is part of the problem. Just making a profit cannot be the compelling solution to improving the nature and quality of the furniture business. Some businesses will, and usually do anything to make a profit. More than a few have gone out of business just trying to make a profit.
For all the feel-good talk about moving the industry to a higher performance and service level, the answer to my question about the reason for being in business may have more to do with purpose and responsibility than in making money.
Wait a moment before jumping to conclusions. With no delusions here, a business needs to be profitable and well managed to remain in business. Duh!
Again, the purpose and responsibility of business needs to be, first, satisfying consumers in every way possible, to earn the financial rewards, the profits, to remain in business.
Appreciating the difference is the difference, especially in difficult times.
Our industry, at every level, must realize that all of us, no matter how detached we are from serving consumers, are really involved in the sacred responsibility of furnishing people’s homes.
When consumers enter a furniture studio or store, they are involved in the sacred responsibility of furnishing their homes. They aren’t concerned with the material well being of the sales people or the store’s executives and owners.
For consumers, furniture is not about inanimate lumber, metal and cloth. Furniture is about all what constitutes a critical part of a home, where people live, learn, yearn, laugh, cry and die. It is the place where values are held and transmitted.
You say, all the warm and fuzzy talk about responsibility doesn’t mesh well with business? Consumers would dramatically challenge that negative assertion, and have been saying so for years in redirecting their discretionary spending.
If the excitement of serving and satisfying consumers doesn’t guide us, no matter where we are in the supply and service chain, then maybe we’re in the wrong business. Ever think of that?
Furniture is exciting, and helping people furnish their homes is a high calling and a sacred responsibility best summarized in the Pirkei Avot (usually translated as Ethics of the Fathers), in which the Jewish sage and influential rabbi Hillel addressed the subject of sacred responsibility:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
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