Eric Schiffer is one of the most important businessmen today, being the CEO of the 99 cents stores, one of the biggest USA retailers, with almost 300 stores around the globe and with a net worth of 1.3 billion dollars. The success of this store is recognized even by the competition, and Eric Schiffer agreed to reveal some secrets of this store.
With a net worth of more than a billion dollars, the number of items sold by this store is impressive. Even if the principle of the store is not to sell any item with more than 1 dollar, there are different items that are sold for less. Eric Schiffer says that the average price for the objects sold in the store is 80 cents, so the company needs to sell about 1.5 billion individual objects to keep this rate of success. 99 cents is a company that is hard to manage, as even a variation of 1 cent for the prices leads to an important variation in the financial figures of the company. As a comparison with a clothes retailer with an average price of 20 dollars for a product, the variation of 1 cent is meaningless, but for Eric, this variation mean 1 % of the profit. On the other hand, a variation of 1 cent for some products with a low value might result in a loss of interest from the clients. Eric Schiffer admits that the most important and hard task for a store of this kind is setting the prices. The prices must be low to attract customers, but they also need to be high enough to bring profits to the company.
The prices are actually higher than they were 20 years ago. Now, you can find several products in the store with a higher value of 1 dollar, and it is normal, considering the inflation and other factors. However, the purpose of the company is to respect the initial concept, and whenever it is possible, the prices are kept under 99 cents, although this means a reduction of profits.
Eric Schiffer knows that sometimes keeping your word to the clients is more important than profits. After all, you can’t change the name of the chain to 1 dollar and 35 cents just because you need to sell something with this price. If an item has a high production cost and the price can’t be kept under a dollar, Eric Schiffer refers to remove the product from the offer of the company.
