CincyEnquirer

Retail slump benefits battery store
May 17 , 2009
by James Pilcher

Amid one of the deepest retail slumps of the past two decades, there is one local branch of a national chain doing extremely well - selling what most would consider the most mundane of items.

Gary Little's two Batteries Plus stores (one in Anderson Township and one in Symmes Township) are both raking in record profits, spurred in part by new technologies but also by old-fashioned economics and a return to frugality by consumers.

Little, 56, moved to the area 15 years ago from Niagara Falls. His stores now have sales in excess of $1 million between the two stores, selling more than 12,000 individual items. And March sales at the Symmes store were up 45 percent year over year, and the store on Beechmont Avenue was up 19 percent for that month. The two stores are now turning a profit, after spending the first few years in the red as Little built up business.

WHAT IS CAUSING this upswing in sales?
In part it is because of the economy. In the last six months, we've seen people hanging on to devices for much longer, with the reasoning it's cheaper to keep the old laptop and just get a new battery - the auto-parts business sees the same kind of thing.

But one long-term thing has been the proliferation in the use of batteries over the last 15-20 years. We now have a whole plethora of devices that use batteries today that didn't exist or didn't use batteries as more and more people become detached and become mobile. The whole field of iPods, iPhones, MP3 players and PDAs - when we opened 6 years ago, they didn't exist. Now, they account for 5 percent of my sales.

YOU ARE IN ONE OF your busy seasons nowadays - why the spring?
Well, people are firing up their lawnmowers for the first time, or getting out their motorcycles. And we do every kind of battery, from large industrial truck and machine batteries to the smallest hearing aid battery. People start pulling out all the things they use outside.

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST misconception about your stores?
We're a unique, unique business. Nobody in the marketplace does what we do. Folks walk into our store for the first time, and they do not realize how many devices use batteries that they never stop to think about. It's really hard to explain without seeing it.

STILL, YOU MUST BE seeing some negative signs?
Sure. Retail overall is struggling at the moment, and we're probably not doing as well as we would have had the economy not turned. We have about 50 percent of our business on the corporate side with company accounts (including customers such as Kings Island, area school districts and sheriff's departments) and we've had customers who went out of business. And on the industrial side, some have told me that they just can't buy anything right now because they have no budget. It has not been as robust as it would have been - but it's not bad, considering what's going on.