Faith Selling

I’ve already posted two examples here and here. Today we are treated to a third. The U.S. anti-Catholic has an article this issue endorsing the idea of betrothal cohabitation and sex as something the Church should consider accepting as morally sound. Why should anyone care about this magazine? Well, the website was just awarded first place by the Catholic Press Association.

You see, there is a “Catholic” establishment made up of self promoting and congratulating members who control the greater percentage of religious education material, Catholic press, “Catholic” music and publishing in this country. These organizations are contributing to the destruction of the Catholic Church in the United States and they are the semi-official filters of what passes for Catholicism in this country. I would wish that the USCCB would do something about this but the USCCB is a board member of the Catholic Publishers Association. You know, the group that just gave a lifetime achievement award to an ex-priest who edits books for a dissident porn writer.

(H/T Curt Jester)

Today we had a customer call us about a series of books, wanting more information about them. We found them for her, put them on the website and then called the publisher to get further information that she asked for. Then she said that she had found them locally and would buy them somewhere else. She just stole at least half an hour of our time to get information that the other store couldn’t provide.

To top it off, she said she was interested in buying them from us if we could answer her questions.

Browsing a store is one thing. Using a company’s expertise without any intention of buying is theft.

To the CBPA,

I would like to register my extreme displeasure in your association’s honoring of Mike Leach at the recent RBTE. The award is supposedly for “In recognition of a lifetime of dedication to the values supported by Catholic publishing. As author, editor, and publisher, few have achieved excellence in, and had such profound influence on, so many facets of the Catholic publishing industry.”

While I won’t deny that he has had a profound impact on Catholic publishing, I would say that he neither portrays values supported by Catholic publishing nor excellence in Catholic publishing.

The speech he gave in which he asked the Pope to stop banning his books, praised his friend and classmate, the head of Call to Action, and his apparent pride that he left the priesthood to get married are only the beginning of a list of reasons that he did not deserve the honor he received.

His work on editing books for dissident priest and porn writer Fr. Andrew Greeley, editing for Crossroads and Orbis, two publishers who have contributed greatly to the spreading of dissent within the Church, and editing the works of Joyce Rupp who frequently refers to God as “she” in her writings and seems to have a very un-Catholic view of spirituality are just more examples of why Mike should not only not be receiving such an award, he shouldn’t be given any publicity at all for his contributions that are destroying the Faith.

I can’t say I am surprised that he received the award based on the board membership for your organization but it is proof that we have a long way to go before we will see an end to the praising of dissent as a good thing and instead praise those who build up the Faith and lead more to Christ instead of away. It also shows that your organization is very disconnected from the average Catholic bookstore and those who shop there.

Sincerely,

Ian Rutherford

The Reply From the CBPA:

    Thank you for your comments regarding the CBPA Lifetime Achievement Award. The Board appreciates the time and thought you have taken in making your opinion known.

Terry Wessels
Catholic Book Publishers Association

If you would also like to register your opinion with an organization that rewards and promotes heresy, send them a note.

This post was inspired by a lively discussion over at Open Book here and here. What I plan on doing is breaking this up into at least four posts. First, why your excuses for not buying from a Catholic store don’t always hold water. Second, why as a Catholic store owner you shouldn’t act like you deserve Catholics’ patronage. Third, what is wrong with the business side of Catholic retailing from publishers to trade associations to the stores themselves. Fourth, what is wrong with the Church that contributes to the problems that stores have. These posts are going to be pretty critical and some might say harsh. Unfortunately, there is a lot to be critical of and harsh about in this industry. Don’t worry, I’ll spread the blame around.

First, why don’t you buy from a Catholic store (whether local or online)? Here are some common objections:

1. Items at the store cost more than at _____.
2. The store marks things up more than is fair.
3. The store isn’t in a convenient location.
4. The store is disorganized, dusty, scary, old, poorly lit, badly stocked, etc.
5. The store doesn’t look like Barnes and Noble.
6. The store doesn’t have a coffee bar.
7. The store is full of pastel colored junk and sappy music.
8. The store sells stuff that is anti-Catholic.
9. They don’t have what I’m looking for.

I think this about covers it.

Responses:

The Catholic store is too expensive.

Your local or online Catholic store is most likely a single entity making between $300k and $2 million gross a year. Out of this comes about 58% in cost of goods, rent, employee pay, insurance, taxes, fixture maintenance, utilities, charitable donations and advertising. If there is anything left, the owner might get a paycheck.

Amazon, BN, Borders, Walmart, etc are multi billion dollar companies with multiple offices, thousands of employees and the buying power of medium-sized countries. These stores can tell publishers that if they want their books on their shelves (virtual or otherwise) they are going to have to a) give 60%+ discounts b) send them books on consignment c) allow them to return whatever they want whenever they want without restocking fees. If your local Catholic store tried to make these demands the owner would be locked up as a lunatic. One commenter on Amy’s blog pointed out that Amazon is selling Jesus of Nazareth for about 20 cents more than he pays wholesale for it.

Your Catholic store cannot compete with these places on price and stay in business.

So the real questions come down to “What are you doing with that extra $8 you saved by shopping at Barnes and Noble?” and “What is the money you spent going to fund now that it is spent?”

If you need that extra $8 to complete your house payment, buy gas so you can get to work, feed your kids or pay for health insurance, then by all means, buy at Barnes and Noble or better yet, buy used.

If you drink Starbucks once or twice a week, enjoy your Itunes, drive a brand new car, shop for your clothes at the mall and own a few tvs, your need to save $8 rings pretty hollow. You see, we talk about “saving” money on a purchase only to turn around and spend it on something we don’t really need anyway. In this case you have just deprived a Catholic store of a sale that helps keep it in business. Your single purchase won’t make or break the store but the hundreds of times this happens every year can mean the difference between bankruptcy and profitability for the Catholic store. What happens to Amazon if Catholics don’t shop with them? Absolutely nothing.

When you shop at the Catholic store you are most likely supporting a Catholic and possibly one with a family. You are helping a business to spread the Faith and possibly make a difference in someone’s life.

When you shop at stores like Barnes and Noble you are supporting a business that has no problem selling porn, homosexual propaganda and anti-Catholic drivel along with the Catholic stuff. You are supporting an organization that donates to gay-rights causes, environmental extremism and population control groups. These companies have no interest in saving souls, they just want to make the largest profit they can.

If you are comfortable with your money going to places like that and “save” your $8 so you can go buy your venti double mocha latte with cream and cinnamon on top, I really can’t argue with you. I just hope you’re happy when you go to buy a First Communion gift and find that the Catholic store is out of business and the family is in bankruptcy. But hey, you saved $8 so it’s all good.

The store marks things up more than is fair.

What exactly is “fair” markup? Is it the 3-5 times you find at the local jewelry store? Is it the 20% or less for computers? Is it the 5+ times for cheap Chinese toys and clothes?

I think “fair” can be defined as: “The amount of profit you need to make to cover expenses, build the business for the future, make a living and support your family now and in the future.” Unfortunately, “fair” for one store isn’t going to be the same as “fair” for another store so you can’t say that because one store marks things up two times wholesale and another 2.5 times the second store is ripping people off.

What I can say is that stores that don’t try to be efficient, don’t bother to modernize and still are charging 2-3 times wholesale are doing their customers a disservice because they are forcing the customer to pay for their inefficiencies and that isn’t the customer’s job. More on this in another post.

As the customer you need to somehow divine the intent of the owner, the profitability of the store and whether the store seems to be run like a business instead of a haphazard hobby. If the store isn’t run like a business or the store is obviously overflowing with cash then you can probably say that the store needs to lower its prices. Unfortunately, making that judgment isn’t very easy and I am pretty sure that assuming the worst of someone without any proof is a sin.

So I ask you to consider: Is the item you want to buy really too expensive or is it just that you don’t want to pay the asking price? Is the item you want to buy really too expensive or is it just that you have gotten so used to buying Chinese junk that you think that things from parts of the world where they don’t artificially deflate their currency and pay bare subsistence wages are overpriced? Do you buy drinks at Starbucks? Why is it that you are willing to pay $5 for a cup of flavored liquid that will be gone in 20 minutes but think that $25 for a hardback book that contains great insights into the person of Jesus Christ that you will probably read more than once is a ripoff? Why is it that you are willing to plunk down $50 a month for Dish when most of the programming is crap but think that $35 for a sterling medal of a saint that may serve as the inspiration someone needs to stay on the path to holiness is cheating you? Why will you spend $5 for a greeting card at Target but think that $5 for a rosary chaplet is asking too much?

If you actually shopped at the Catholic store instead of going to these other places, you might find that 1) the prices aren’t that bad when you consider the actual reason you are buying the item and 2) the store is much more likely to have competitive prices if people shop there regularly.

The store isn’t in a convenient location.

Catholic stores aren’t like Starbucks. First, there aren’t enough Catholics who care about their Faith to have one (or two) on every corner. Second, they have to go where they can afford the rent. Since most Catholics don’t buy Catholic stuff and many Catholics who do would rather save a few bucks instead of shopping at the Catholic store, they have to go to places that aren’t the happening spots for shopping.

Catholic stores are what are considered a “destination store”. You don’t just drive down the street and wander into a Catholic store. You almost always intend to go there. If you want Catholic stuff, and you want your Catholic stores to be in convenient locations, you have to frequent them so they make enough money to move out of the low rent district into more desirable digs.

If you don’t have a local store or really can’t make the trip to it, there are Catholic stores online, such as ours, that would be grateful for your business.

The store is disorganized, dusty, scary, old, poorly lit, badly stocked, etc.

This is one of the biggest complaints I have about Catholic stores. Most are run by older people who don’t really seem to have an interest in making their stores welcoming. This isn’t always the case but frequently it is. I mean, how much effort does it take to organize books by subject? Or vacuum occasionally? Or maybe replace the burned out lights?

When stores are like this I can’t blame you for not patronizing them. They have basically assumed an attitude of “We are here so we deserve your business no matter how we treat you.”

If you do really care though, you might ask if you can work on a volunteer basis and help straighten up the store.

The store doesn’t look like Barnes and Noble.

Your local Catholic store isn’t Barnes and Noble. Get over it. Barnes and Noble has millions of dollars to spend each time it opens a store. I know. My sales manager used to open them. Your local Catholic store MIGHT, if it is extremely blessed, start with $100,000. Most likely it is starting with under $50,000 and a lot of prayers. If you happen to know some rich Catholics who want to invest in Catholic stores, we’d be happy to meet them. As far as we can tell, rich Catholics for the most part aren’t interested in Catholic retail.

The store doesn’t have a coffee bar.

See The store doesn’t look like Barnes and Noble above.

The store is full of pastel colored junk and sappy music.

When we started our store this is the very thing we wanted to avoid. Catholicism doesn’t have to be a bunch of cheep porcelain trinkets. We believe that things should be beautiful, high quality and not come from China. This puts us in a position where we sell very few statues and our prices are higher than your average store but we don’t do junk.

Sappy music is also something we avoid. Catholicism doesn’t have to be made from saccharine and pastels. There is plenty of beautiful art and good sacred music to fill a store without resorting to My Little Porcelain Chinese Angels.

The store sells stuff that is anti-Catholic.

If there is anything that should disqualify a store from receiving your business, this is it. If a store is willing to poison the souls of its shoppers, it deserves to go out of business and quickly. Ask your local store (or your online store) if they have any sort of guarantee that the stuff they sell is really Catholic. If they can’t answer your question, put your hand over your wallet, back away and never come back.

They don’t have what I’m looking for.

Have you asked? If a store isn’t willing to special order, that’s another sign that they don’t really care about you, they just want your money with as little hassle as possible. I wouldn’t spend much time there either.

I think that about covers the objections to shopping at Catholic stores. Some are legitimate, most aren’t. Think very carefully about whether you want a place to buy Catholic stuff from Catholic families or if you would rather only have Amazon and BN as your options. If you think having Catholic stores is a good idea, skip Starbucks for a day and go buy that book at a Catholic store.

Update: Back on May 9th Catholic Financial Services acknowledged receipt of our completed forms and said that our withdrawal request was being resubmitted. Today (May 24th) we received all of our paperwork back from the post office unopened with an “unclaimed” note attached. This means that a) CFS lied about getting our mailed paperwork and b) They haven’t checked their P.O. Box for about three weeks.

—

Following up on our dealings with Catholic Financial Services (Catholic Online) here and here, shows that things haven’t changed a bit with the company. A month after we started asking for a reason why we weren’t getting our money we received a note that a $2 transaction had been revoked by the sender and that was holding up our transaction of several thousand dollars. When I said that we would be happy to have the transaction decreased by that amount so we could get the rest of the money, we were told that we had never filled out all the paperwork for our account.

I filled out the paperwork and overnighted it to them as well as faxed it. Then I waited. No response. I sent them a couple of notes and was told that our transaction was being put back in process. That was on May 9th. It is now 22 days later and follow up requests for a date when we will receive our money have been ignored. I filled out their official dispute resolution form last Sunday and received an automated reply that I would here back within 48 hours. It has now been three days.

The only other correspondence I have received from them is a threat to legal action against our company for posting about our experience dealing with them.

If you currently advertise with Catholic Online I strongly suggest stopping. If you were thinking about it, think again. This company is bad news.

While this is directed specifically at Catholics, having this (or equivalent) information about your customers is essential to long term success in your business.1) Name - Customers that you can greet by name are far more likely to feel welcome in your store and will buy more because you have taken the time to remember who the person is. This works on the phone too. Get the customer’s as soon as possible when they call so you can use it while you talk to them.

Also, if you keep a customer’s name in your system you can actually figure out statistics on your customers.

2) Mailing address - if you ever want to let your customer base know about events at your store having a mailing address is essential. Also, if you want to figure out where your customer base lives (are people only coming from a specific area or do they drive all the way across town?) in order to expand your marketing appropriately, this is kind of critical.

3) Email - quick, free mass promotion. If you have some kind of rewards program in your store (we have a Faithful Shopper program with punch cards) that requires an email address, people are much more likely to give it than if you just ask.

4) Parish membership - knowing where your customers come from is essential to knowing if your bulletin ads work. You should make all of your print ads coupons so that you can track sales from the ads. If you can’t track your advertising, you are throwing away your money.

5) Lay organization membership - if you know that a specific customer is a member of the Serra Club, you can recommend the latest book on vocations to that person knowing that you have a pretty good chance of getting a sale. If you know that the shopper is the diocesan head of Social Services, you can recommend the new Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching. If you don’t know these things, you can’t make informed recommendations that might lead to extra sales.

6) Customer interests - is your customer really into apologetics? Does your customer have a special devotion to St. Gianna? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say “Hi Dave, we just got in a great new book on answering Fundamentalist attacks on Mary, would you like to see it?”

7) Customer concerns - if a customer says on one visit that her dad is in the hospital, wouldn’t she appreciate being asked how dad is doing the next time she comes in?

8 ) Top customers - customers love being thanked for their business. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could send a special gift to your best customers each year? We sent candy gift boxes with thank you notes to our top ten customers and best vendors last Thanksgiving. You would not believe the response we received.

9) Who do your customers know or work for - wouldn’t it be a good thing to know that a particular customer is the parish secretary for a parish that you have been trying to get to notice you? Why not give her a special item to pass on to the pastor?

10) Why do your customers buy (or not buy) from you - knowing this will tell you if your business has a visible mission and also if there are things that your business needs to work on.

Related Posts:
Why do your customers shop with you?

As a store owner, one of the most important pieces of information you can have is the reasons your customers shop at your store. If you can give an answer that isn’t your personal opinion but an actual survey of your customers, you are ahead of the curve.

If all you have is a guess, then you are projecting your own preferences on your customers and may be completely wrong. This is a really bad way to run a business. If you don’t know why your customers shop with you, you can’t emphasize those reasons and may end up inadvertently doing something to change your customers’ opinion of your store.

I recommend asking your customers to fill out a simple, one page survey at the counter while they are waiting in line. You can give them a free holy card for filling it out.

Here are some good questions to ask:

1. Do you prefer our store above all other places in town to buy Catholic gifts? Why or why not?
2. Do you buy Catholic products on-line? If so, do you buy them from our website? (If you don’t have a website, get one.)
3. Do you recommend our store to other people? Why or why not?
4. What one thing do you wish we carried that we don’t?
5. If you could design the “perfect” Catholic store, describe what it would be like.

From these five questions you can find out:

1) If your customers actually come to your store on purpose.
2) Whether or not you are losing sales to stores that have websites.
3) Whether or not your customers will risk their reputation by recommending your store to others.
4) What you should be carrying but don’t.
5) What you should be planning for for the future.

If your customers don’t shop at you for a reason other than convenience, buy Catholic things online from other businesses and don’t recommend you to friends, you have some problems that need to be fixed quickly.

First, you have to have an identity that extends beyond being “that Catholic store downtown”. If that’s all you have, someone who has a concrete mission and some initiative can take away your business very quickly.

Second, if your customers won’t recommend your store to others, you are going to have a very hard time increasing your business. Getting your customers excited about your store requires taking care of the first issue as well as focusing on customer service and making your store a place that people don’t feel grubby walking into. Keep the store clean, well lit and organized with clearly labeled sections.

Third, you really need to get a website. You may not personally shop on-line and many of your customers may not shop on-line but if you want to cater towards younger Catholics you are going to have to have a web presence. You can have someone do it for you, you can let us take care of the lion’s share of the work or you can hope that younger Catholics will always drive down to your store instead of buying stuff on-line.

Related posts:
What is your quest?
10 Tips for improving your Catholic store

In the previous post on this topic I mentioned that Catholic Company had removed all of the questionable posts and stopped poaching on Google searches for our company name. Well, they’re back. Now they are poaching on our domain for Alexa searches and Google searches with a different company of theirs. Catholic Overstock is where they put all of their sale items.

You would think that after being called on it once and acknowledging that there was a problem by taking down the links, they would avoid doing it again. Makes you wonder where this company gets its ethics from.

Related Post:

 When Marketing Runs Ahead of Ethics

Don’t post these at work. Ever. (Even if they are really, really funny.)

Thanks to Julie, the Happy Catholic, for reminding me about this site.

Update:  I just checked the company’s blogs and Google search terms and all of the things I have screen shots of below have been removed from the blogs and they no longer appear to be poaching on our company name. While I appreciate that they were removed, why did it have to be brought to public attention at all? Why would decisions like this have been made in the first place?

As you were:

Let me preface this post by saying that the company I am writing about is a direct competitor of ours and a darn strong one at that. I have never posted about them before because I am all for honest competition. It makes the competitors stronger. However, a couple of recent events have prompted me to write this post because I believe that the illustration of what happens when the desire for profit runs ahead of ethical considerations is instructive to all Catholic business owners. There are plenty of companies out there that will help you get your site publicized. There are many who will do it ethically. There are many who will not. You always have to ask very careful questions about what exactly a company is going to do to “help” you before you buy into their promises.

The company I am writing about is The Catholic Company. I hope that whoever bought the domain name for them was given a very large bonus. They have acquired several Catholic domains and companies over the years which all feed off of their product database. Not a problem. We have a storefront program for other Catholic stores that lets them have their own domain using our content. They also have several product blogs that feature products from their sites. Also not a problem. This blog is an official company blog and we post our newsletters and link to products all the time. The difference between what we do and what they do is that we are up front about it.

Consider this image taken from the official blog of the Catholic Company:

The author of this post talks about how he just “came across” the website for Catholic Overstock. The only problem is that Catholic Overstock is owned by The Catholic Company. So, he didn’t just “come across” it, he is just promoting his own company but acting like this is just some random company he stumbled across.

A couple of other examples from the “official?” blog for Catholic Overstock.

If you were writing a blog about your own company, would you write blog posts that sound like they are written by someone who just found your site on the web? Now it is pretty clear in spite of the blog providing no information about itself or the authors that it is just a link farm for Catholic Overstock. While we could certainly discuss the merits of using a blog with no real substance as a tool to boost Google rankings, the real issue is that these posts are written with the appearance of being from an interested third party instead of as marketing by the company.

A little bit of digging shows that the various Catholic Company blogs are powered by a company called Triangle Direct. Triangle Direct does various things including blog hosting, blog post writing and syndication and link building. The problem with companies like this is that they “link build” by paying bloggers to put links into articles or blog rolls or they create a series of “blogs” that are really only in existence to provide link real estate. They also put your links onto a series of blogs much as the link directories and link farms do - there really isn’t a consideration about quality. It’s about money. If you can find the various blogs owned by Catholic Company, you will notice that Catholic Company doesn’t link to the blogs, only the blogs link to Catholic Company. This makes it appear that these blogs are independent of Catholic Company and its various sites in order to boost the perceived importance of Catholic Company to the search engines. It is possible that these blogs are being written by Triangle Direct and not directly by Catholic Company employees but that certainly shows a lack of oversite that needs to be corrected.

Another thing that Catholic Company is doing is hosting various domain names with the exact same content with different ip ranges. Huh? What this means is that to the search engines, it can appear that these duplicate sites are really unique domains which can lead to the same pages showing up more times in search results. For example, Catholic Company is located at 72.32.13.233. Catholic Books and Gifts is located at 66.150.161.141. Catholic Family Gifts is located at 69.20.102.17. Normally, all the numbers would be very similar to each other because you usually host identical content with the same host. It is possible that they are doing this as a backup in case their main hosting company goes down but since they all use the same database, it seems a little strange.

Finally, Catholic Company is buying ads on Google that pop up when people do a search for “aquinas and more”. Yes, they own Get Fed too so they are really buying double placement when searches are done for our company name.

Now, I don’t have a problem with competing on keyword ads for products like rosaries, but when a company is trying to poach on customers who are looking specifically for you, you could call it rude or you could call it unethical. Imagine that you call 411 to get directions to a specific restaurant but that the restaurant’s competitor has paid Information to give directions to his restaurant instead. Would that bother you?

As a Catholic business you have to hold yourself to a higher standard than other companies. What may be legal is frequently not ethical and you always have to ask yourself if what you are doing is ethical. The things I mentioned above are all legal but they all bring into question the ethics of the company pursuing these marketing tactics. Don’t let your desire for profits get ahead of your ethical considerations. It may increase your profits but it won’t be good for you in the long run.