Johnny Green Mart. Tomorrows Wal-Mart And Nothing Like Them."THINK GREEN NEWS"
The future of retailing turns green. Times changes and so does retail. There just may be a new rising star in the midst . There always is.
(PRWEB) November 24, 2003
The www. johnnygreenmart. com concept is in about the same place Wal-Mart was when Sam Walton was aggressively pursuing just what it would take to create the retail giant of his tomorrow. Those were the times when K-mart was the king of the Blue Light Special and Sears and Roebuck owned the hearts and pocket books of America.
Who would have ever guessed that this man with such a grand vision would come to own the market place and become the retail giant of all time. Times changes and so does retail. There just may be a new rising star in the midst . There always is.
The up and rising Johnny Green Mart concept is as new and different for what it is doing as Wal-Mart was in its early beginnings: A lot of new ideas and approaches with a deep understanding of the future and doing it like no one has ever done before. Quite possibly, Johnny Green Mart is realistically at the same stage as Sam Walton was in when K-Mart ruled America
"Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way."
By Sam Walton
The interesting part of the Johnny Green Mart concept is that the approach is definitely much more efficient than the current Wal-Marts in a way that will make it tremendously hard for them to compete in the future. They would have to dump all those physical stores and then become partially co-op based. This could get interesting.
The founder stated you couldnÂt truly be the most efficient retailer tomorrow when you have 3000 stores spread across the U. S. The infrastructure for this alone is in the billions and billions of dollars and someone has got to pay for it. You add in the cost of employeeÂs not to mention the executiveÂs salaries - and someone has got to pay for that.
The kickbacks from the government may hide some of the true building costs (creating a better accounting ratio of expense to sales). But in reality, it is a still a bottom line cost and the local taxpayer shells it out regardless of how it is calculated. These facts can only be hidden so long before public information technologies begin to detail and chronicle the true cost of everything made, sold and disposed of, all encompassing.
The cost of those goods is generally much higher than the retail price you are paying. As the Government becomes more accountable due to the advances in information technology, these actual costs will play strongly in the future pricing of those same stores.
"Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For 25 years running - long before Wal-Mart was known as the nation's largest retailer - we ranked No. 1 in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient."
As quoted by Sam Walton
The founders of Johnny Green Mart also stated they will never build more that 60 super stores across the U. S. The ultimate goal is to get the goods from natural resources to the consumer at the lowest cost achievable. They seem to be a convergence of Wal-MartÂs efficiency, Trader JoeÂs unique and savvy local buying with a competitiveness like U. P.S and Amazon merging to maximize distribution efficiencies and then some.
The stores are planned be located generally in the most ideal spot per State and the consumer will either have to travel the distance or order from a web site that is already growing into the Industrial Light and Magic of cyber space. The majority of Green Goods will be delivered (By a fleet of alternative fueled vehicles) or picked up at one of these stores. Green goods by nature are investment value as opposed to most synthetic based disposable goods.
Green Goods? The concept is founded on achieving a 100% green based line of goods marketed and sold just like any other product you find in a large department store. To make it even more challenging the focus is to be 100% green from raw material, manufacturing all the way into the hands of the consumer.
They also have a solid plan of action for all products and packaging to be managed from the creation to end of life cycles. They have a strong interest in managing these goods all the way through to recycling and conversion of materials to compost and bio-fuels which they intend to turn into an additional revenue source.
The co-op stores themselves will be created more to showcase the up and coming green goods and will be owned by the people that work there. It is a very cost effective strategy and allows management cost to be cut dramatically through a natural set of checks and balances inherent to co-ops.
They said the wholesale division would be the backend of the retail stores and serve as a pickup and routing point for products. The front-end of these stores will have an emphasis on entertainment and education with events that support charities and showcase local artisans and manufacturers in that state.
The actual (Front end) stores will be modeled after the Glamorous department stores of the early 20th century using sustainable building strategies. The concept operates as part co-op working in collaboration with parts corporate. A kind of merging of B2B and B2C for maximum efficiency.
The backend (distribution) will be run as a cutting edge distribution center to facilitate the movement of goods. The goal is to cut the cost for green goods and to achieve the same volume as several thousand stores in under a hundred nationwide. With those numbers they expect some very satisfied co-op partners. Only companies owned by the people that work in them can achieve the old fashioned customer service that has been lost for the last several decades.
The founder admitted the challenge and commented that it was only a few hundred years ago that the entire society of the world was basically green based. He stated if we can go to the moon, then we can take the only planet we know of that supports life - and figure a way to creatively and profitably make the natural environment the main economy.
While we have made tremendous advances with machinery and technology, we have overlooked some basic realities. We do need a healthy environment or we have nothing. You do need good air to breathe. We just basically merged the environmental issues with our plans to become the retailing giant of tomorrow. And we will. The founder of Johnny Green Mart commented we are simply, Â Taking the best from the past into future, todayÂ.
While we are aggressively building our business model, we are dealing with the extreme challenges of finding the green goods and variety of products that can compete with the current retail line of non-green goods. Our new online virtual department store is cutting edge, but our 100% green-based products line is currently limited.
That will change as people realize that every single product created can be made100% green and cost competitive. In a way, we are a very grass roots retailing operation that favors small companies, especially co-op owned. We are working with every manufacturer to help them attain the infrastructure to produce the variety of green goods we will need to be cost competitive.
The current pricing of green goods is generally unacceptable especially when you take into consideration that the reality is that it actually takes a lot less to make these goods. Somehow, an infrastructure has been built to create the perception that synthetic based products are less expensive - but the real cost through the entire process is tremendously higher. We intend to bring that to light through some very dynamic communications as we grow to become the largest retailer (co-op) in the world.
The Johnny Green Mart concept is big on co-ops and community owned retail stores. The future holds new ways a company must earn its income in the future. They have a focus that money earned in that community should stay in that community. It looks like they are putting mom & pop back in business in a big kind of way.
They seem to have found a strategy to take back the market that the big box retailers took away from the mom & pops, tweak it out and put the mom & pops on an even playing field with a lot more advantages. (Green ones too) This should also create a lot more advantages for Johnny Green Mart to use in becoming the biggest retailer in America.
The concept is extremely aggressive, but anyone who has seen and viewed the refreshing and innovative plans of this company soon realizes they are very focused and determined. This reporter has no doubts who the number one retailer of tomorrow will be, and is thrilled to have just met them.