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Why do I often see small strip like shopping areas with Starbucks, Mattress Firm, and assorted cell phone carriers (sometimes Verizon, maybe Sprint, maybe something else)? Why are these three businesses so often linked? I not only see this pattern in the area I live but also as I travel across the country.
I've puzzled this around in my head over and over. Is there an accepted pattern of life that people shop for a phone, then decide to buy a mattress, then have a cup of coffee to wake up? What am I missing?
Starbucks isn't hard to figure. You often stop for a cup, perhaps daily. Cell phone, many users trade them in frequently. Mattresses a little harder to figure, they last perhaps ten years and don't change much. Maybe in a transient area, since many tenants don't move the old mattresses, just buy a new one with every move.
Yeah, the mattress place is hardest to figure. I assume the mattress businesses know they have to be "next door" to those other VERY popular businesses because they know that's the only way they may gain business too.
If the mattress place was next to other obscure businesses, for example, a football memorabilia place, a kitchen supply store, and a lamp store, it would be like a ghost town w/ tumbleweeds running through most of the shopping plaza. I'm just saying there won't be nearly as many customers.
Why do I often see small strip like shopping areas with Starbucks, Mattress Firm, and assorted cell phone carriers (sometimes Verizon, maybe Sprint, maybe something else)? Why are these three businesses so often linked? I not only see this pattern in the area I live but also as I travel across the country.
I've puzzled this around in my head over and over. Is there an accepted pattern of life that people shop for a phone, then decide to buy a mattress, then have a cup of coffee to wake up? What am I missing?
Many malls are getting rid of their clothing stores, and the stores you find are where people buy things they actually need, like something consumable (coffee, tea) mattress (everyone sleeps in a bed) and cell phones, which everyone uses these days.
Stores that sell contemporary clothing, costume jewelry, knick knacks and such are first to go out of business during a recession.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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I have never seen that around here. We have 2 strip malls in our small city of 60k, and between them a total of 4 Starbucks, no mattress store, 2 cell phone carriers. The nearest mattress stores are in a larger city about 14 miles away, where there are 4 within a mile of each other, none near a Starbucks.
Check out the Things You Should Know podcast on mattress stores. It's pretty informative. Basically the cost of operating a mattress store is extremely light, off the top of my head you only need to sell about a dozen, give or take, a month to make all your bills including labor. They're also more frequent now because no one bought mattresses for almost a solid decade, mostly because of the financial crisis. People now have the money to buy new ones and they'll spend good money on quality. In addition, although mattresses tend to be replaced every 8-10 years, when you have tens or hundreds of thousands of people passing specific shopping centers or intersections, you can be assured that there are hundreds of people in need of a new mattress. That's why you see all the nationwide mattress dealers all concentrated in the same area, it's all about research on where there will be the most traffic.
There are a handful of reasons. Mattress stores are very profitable (50% margin on a mattress.) They don't have to warehouse much, many times only paying the manufacturer after they sell the mattress, and they don't need expensive retail space, as you don't window shop a mattress, only going into one when you decide you need to buy it. Also, people won't order one off the internet, at least not in good numbers.
So, your overhead is the display models, the lease, and the staff...
I would actually suspect that the same is true of cell phone stores. They cell service plans. The sell phones too, but they are small and they don't stock tons of inventory. Everyone needs a phone and a phone plan, and phones fail relatively frequently.
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