If you look at the cars at Costco, there’s BMWs and Volvos. I think there’s a reason they’re affluent.
The two stores up north get the higher percentage of coupons back, no matter what the offer is. I have stores in Hadley and Northampton, MA, a store in Agawam, which is a working class area, and an inner city store in Springfield, MA. RATNER: The wealthier you are, the more you use coupons. And people love it.ĭIRECT: Do you see that certain segments are more likely to redeem coupons? If we average 30% profit, I’ve made $50, and these are guys I don’t want to lose to Petco and Petsmart. People say “why are you doing this? They’ll come to your store anyway.” I say they’ve already spent $150 with me. It was good the first three weeks of December, and we will probably get a 50 or 60% response. RATNER: We recently did a direct mail piece with a $5 gift certificate, no purchase necessary, just as a thank you to all our customers who spent over $150 during the course of the year. Every month we contact one group of customers. If we have 9Lives on sale, we only call people who buy 9Lives. I make the recording, and it’s very specific.
We also use SmartReply to call our 40,000 “Club Dave” members. RATNER: We e-mail our customers every month with specials, and we’re redoing our Web site ( to have more pictures of what is happening in the store on the site. We asked Ratner for his thoughts on what makes for a strong customer bond in the pet space.ĭIRECT: How do you keep in touch with your customers? The company recently launched Simply the Best, Dave’s in-house brand of dog food, in about 1,000 independent pet stores around the country. Not surprisingly, the big box pet stores like Petco and PetSmart are Dave’s main competition. We chatted recently with Dave Ratner, the “chief instigating officer” of Dave’s Soda and Pet City, an Agawam, MA-based chain of pet supply stores (that, yes, also sells soda). We are like an icon in Western Mass.It doesn’t matter if your clientele has four legs, two legs, wings or fins: good customer relationships are vital. We have earned a great reputation in the community. I don’t see people’s love of their pets disappearing any time soon. We are selling high end and lower end food.įor our own business, the future is very good. We have become a lot more aggressive with prices. We buy overstocks and we pass the deals on to our customers.įortunately, we actually had to hire some help. With five stores we have pretty good buying power. We have so many promotions and deals we keep getting more customers. We’ve been in this building two years, where the size has allowed me to buy large quantities of things. You still buy the premium food, but not the treats that go with it.
The good news is we have been OK because maybe you can’t stand your husband or wife, you hate your kids, but you love your dog or cat. We sell every brand of pet food known to man and all kinds of nonalcoholic beverages and waters, pet supplies, fish, small animals, birds and reptiles. We now have five stores, in Agawam, Springfield, Northampton, Ware and Hadley. In 1976, I opened my second store, in Agawam in an abandoned four-bay car wash. I decided to go into the pet food business.
About a year later, I bought a dog, a Bentley beagle, and one day I went into a grocery store to buy dog food and noticed there was more pet food than soda. I started in 1975 selling all different brands of soda out of an abandoned Arco station on Route 9 in Hadley. Voices of the Valley: Dave Ratner, Dave’s Soda and Pet City
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