by Burlington Furniture is closed this week. And most of next week, too.
The Vermont store shut its doors the day before Christmas and will not reopen until Jan. 6. And everybody is getting paid.
Perhaps a dark store is not normally major news, but as we watch the relentless struggle to weather this generational storm in furniture retailing, it caught our attention. We don’t often hear about stores turning off the lights for two weeks and sending everyone home on paid leave — especially not during a major holiday when so many families are at home and thinking about ways to spend money.
But owner Mark Binkhorst decided he and his team needed and deserved a break. The holiday vacation is just one element of his focus on making sure that his staff enjoys their jobs.
“The most important element in this company is the people who work here,” he said. “We spend a lot of time together, and we all want to have a good time while we’re at it.”
Like most of us, Binkhorst didn’t know what to expect when the pandemic forced society and business to shut down starting in March 2020. He feared the store he opened in 1984 might be coming to the end of its run.
Of course, as most any home furnishings merchant will tell you, Covid-19 has not been an existential crisis so much as an endurance test. Up on Lake Champlain less than an hour from the Canadian border, it’s been all-hands-on-deck for nearly two years.
“We are fully cognizant of just how stressful this pandemic has been,” Binkhorst says. In addition to shutting down for the holidays, he rearranged the store’s work week, and now Burlington Furniture is closed every Tuesday and Wednesday. “We wanted to take care of ourselves and still take care of what was in front of us.”
What’s in front of Burlington Furniture is quite a bit more than what was on its plate at the start of 2020. Binkhorst changed the store’s schedule upon reopening in mid-2020. At first he was thinking that the extra day would be justified by reduced traffic and sales, but he quickly recognized that rather than controlling costs he needed to regulate stress and keep his small staff — 5.5 designers — from burning out.
“We’ve done it since we reopened. We really thought we’d be doing 30 to 50% less business, not 50% more,” he says.
And that’s also the simple explanation why Binkhorst was willing to close the tap on revenue for two weeks and also pay his staff.
“We’ve been very fortunate in our industry,” he says “We’ve all been in the same storm even if we aren’t all in the same boat. (This idea of shutting down for a break) does resonate with a lot of people I talk to in our business. We need a reprieve. We need a rest.”
Binkhorst has a sales staff of 5.5 people, and he’d love to have more. His top designers wrote more than $1.5 million in sales for the most recent fiscal year, and the entire staff shows up and conquers huge mountains of work every day.
“The reality is that the people who are still working are working twice as hard,” he says. Of course, he’d like to add staff, but good candidates are hard to find. He decided it would be essential to keep the people he has happy and healthy as much as possible.
“More energy should be spent on retaining our team rather than struggling to replace them,” he says. “We have great people already. I want this store to be a work environment they enjoy.”
As the new realities of the pandemic began to express themselves in the latter half of 2020, Binkhorst saw an obvious opportunity to lighten the load of his existing staff. “We wanted to see what we could do to support them further,” he says.
While lead times doubled and tripled to lengths not seen since the mid-20th century, he hired another person whose chief responsibility was to track orders and communicate that information to customers and staff.
Besides taking that task off the shoulders of the store’s designers, she is the contact person when customers call with questions. But more often than not, she tries to reach out with information before they call. “She writes love letters to our customers, and it’s a huge help,” Binkhorst says. “You can’t make all of the people happy all of the time, but we’re doing our best.” Managing expectations, he adds, is an invaluable skill these days.
Binkhorst also had to make some strategic buying decisions during the pandemic as he saw factories falling behind.
“We chose to own the pandemic rather than let it own us, he said, describing a spreadsheet that helped him identify the products he should absolutely keep stocked. Instead of cancelling his import orders, Binkhorst doubled down and got more aggressive on his long-term buys.
“It quickly became apparent that inventory was the new king instead of cash,” he says. “We needed the product, and we went deep and narrow on best sellers from our special order vendors.”
As it piled up, the warehouse behind the store filled rapidly and before long mattresses were being stored in Binkhorst’s office. The inconvenience paid off, and Binkhorst is pleased to report that for the business year ended in September, 94% of Burlington Furniture’s orders were delivered.
Read more about Burlington Furniture here.
