Sandy Zimmerman's retail marriage of quality, discounts, and service has turned an obsure New York town into a mecca for a new breed of consumers.
It is, for Sandy Zimmerman, the perfect summer's day. The air is chill, and torrents of rain cascade from a leaden sky. The doors of Cohoes Specialty Stores Ltd., his store in Cohoes, N.Y., opened just half an hour ago, but already Zimmerman's parking lot is awash in Volvos and Hondas, Cadillacs and Chevettes, cars from the Albany area and beyond, day trippers and summer tourists from nearby Massachusetts and Vermont and from distant Florida and Texas, flooding the store.
Zimmerman can feel the energy inside, the pre-August adrenaline. August -- his biggest month in a $30 million selling year, equivalent to other retailers' Christmas rush -- is just three days away, with its Sunday hours and late nights, art shows, professional models, and furs shipped up from Manhattan. Mostly, it is the crowds, throngs of people at nearby Saratoga Springs for the racing season: Angel Cordero and Martha Raye, assorted Whitneys and a gaggle of Du Ponts, celebrities, socialites, and big spenders walking out with 26 pairs of shoes or $30,000 worth of fur.
Zimmerman stands by the wide staircase leading up to the second floor, tan suit pressed, blue polo shirt crisp, Italian loafers polished, a proprietary half-smile playing across his round face. At 52, for all his years in retailing, he is still impressed by how many motivated people it takes to make a store hum. Three times today he has cruised the floor, trying to get a seat-of-the-pants feel for what the figures tell and rallying the staff, remembering not just their names, but that the new painter up on the third floor this morning is the son of Ted in maintenance, that John the operations manager has just painted the company station wagon, and where Sylvia in furs plans to go for her vacation. "Hello, Mark," he says, patting a salesman's shoulder. "I hear you sold someone seven pairs of slacks this morning." His brown eyes catch a scrap of paper on the carpet -- he picks it up. A stray packing case stands by the technicolor sweater bar -- he will have it moved. "My Dad says you're a pretty good shoe salesman," he compliments a hidden figure carting a pillar of boxes through the 90,000-pair stockroom. The outfits above the shoe display are still summer goods -- he will have them changed for fall. And wouldn't the cosmetic section look better if the light were a little closer?
His sales staff of more than 300 people, nearly four times that of a comparably sized suburban department store, is on the floor. Ads are running in the local papers, the Saratoga Racing form, the program for the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and on AM/FM radio -- all designed to stress the concepts that make Cohoes unique: quality fashion goods in the latest style, presented with flair, sold with full service, and priced for less. Many discount houses resemble dingy barns crammed with junk, low quality for low price, no amenities, no displays, and no service. Off-price stores like Loehmann's Inc. in New York or Melville Corp.'s Marshalls chain, the current darlings of the retail analysts, may carry brand names for less, but their goods are seconds, overcut merchandise, or last season'sstyles.
Cohoes has nothing but the latest -- and the best. The merchandise has been pouring in, moved from the loading dock to the marking room to the floor: Calvin Klein jackets and Fila tennis wear, Dean sweaters and Albert Nippon dresses, each with its price tag proclaiming the value that draws shoppers from miles away. A Trigere coat, manufacturer's suggested price, $400; Cohoes price, $270. A $440 Ralph Lauren men's suit, $340; a $1,700 Judith Leiber handbag, $1,270; $40 Opium perfume, $32. An $11,900 Piaget Polo watch, $8,900. Everything is discounted.
A discount operation, even one as extraordinary as Cohoes, was hardly what Zimmerman had in mind when he decided to leave the corporate world. He had built a 27-year career in department stores by stressing customer service and staff satisfaction. But as he climbed the career ladder, retailing was changing; staffs and service were being cut to meet rising costs. And once he got near the top, as chief executive officer of Abraham & Straus, of Federated Department Stores Inc., he no longer had time for contact with the day-to-day business on the floor; instead he was enmeshed in corporate politics.
In 1979, in what The New York Times politely called "a policy disagreement," Zimmerman left Federated. Along with Ben E. Ames, a fellow Federated malcontent, he invested "several million dollars" to buy Cohoes Manufacturing Co., a small 43-year-old discount/retail business with a strong local reputation. He bet against the crowd -- for service and against markups -- and the business boomed. Sales grew more than 20% each year, and volume doubled to more than $30 million, with an aftertax profit of 6%, twice the industry average. With the opening this past July of his first branch store, halfway between Hartford, Conn., and Springfield, Mass., sales growth is expected to continue.
Let other retailers rely on sales, he thinks. They're just cutting their own throats. At Cohoes the excitement is with the merchandise; profit comes with productivity. Cohoes is the store of the future, he says proudly, "and, damn, it's exciting."
His eyes catch a woman flipping through packaged Danskin leotards, a Fendi bag strung across a bony shoulder. "Excuse me," he says, his voice so soft she has to lean forward to hear him. "Did you notice that we have Fendi bags in the store? We just got them in."
"Oh, you don't want to tell me that," she answers happily. "I've already spent all my money."
Years ago, before the industry went south and the young people moved away, the city of Cohoes was a thriving mill center shipping garments down the Mohawk and Hudson rivers to Manhattan. But today the paint is peeling off the tumbledown row houses on the hill, the saloons are decorated in burned-out neon, and deserted variety stores display 95 cent novels and yesterday's papers. The store is downtown, 90,000 square feet, with 60,000 square feet of selling space blossoming unexpectedly amidst the empty warehouses and rubble-filled lots, two bright red brick additions flanking the original Depression-deco manufacturing plant. Luminous orange billboards -- "Cohoes, Worth A Trip From Anywhere" -- sprout from the otherwise empty street corners.
