The Levitz Agency

09/15/2026

The customer had to turn on a red light to get a salesman.

The salespeople sat and waited for it. No wonder that chain did not last.

This was Portland. The company I worked for bought a chain called Self Serve Furniture, and my team converted the stores.

The name told you everything. Little red lights on poles all over the store. The salespeople sat down and did not talk to the customers. When a customer wanted to buy something, she clicked a light, and somebody came over to write her up.

Somebody thought that was a good idea.

Those poles are what the wrong kind of automation looks like. It took the person off the floor and left the customer alone with a button.

Here is where it matters today.

Everybody is selling owners a way to automate something. Some of it will put a red light in your store and call it progress.

The right kind does the opposite. It takes the busywork off your associate. The review that needs an answer. The thank you note that never went out. The customer who has not heard from you since delivery. So he is up and walking over when she comes in, not sitting down waiting for a light.

A customer can tell the difference between a store that is ready for her and a store that is waiting on her.

Is there a red light anywhere in your store?

09/14/2026

The best salesman on that floor never said can I help you.

He walked up, said four words, and waited.

"Living room or bedroom?"

That was it. Then he stood there until you answered.

His nickname was Sarge. Six foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds. Not fat, just a big fella. A little older. Gruff and direct and to the point.

I was not in sales on that floor. I handled the pricing and approved the discounts, and I started noticing what the salespeople were doing.

Here is what I noticed about Sarge.

He had two greetings.

A stranger got living room or bedroom.

A customer he already knew never heard that line. He knew them the second they walked in, and he was nice to them.

That is the whole difference between a stranger and a customer. Whether somebody on your floor knows her when she comes through the door.

A lot of stores treat the woman who bought a bedroom from them two years ago exactly like somebody who wandered in off the street.

She feels it. She will never say a word about it.

Would anybody on your floor know your best customer by name if she walked in today?

09/13/2026

The Dump is closing in five cities. One of them is mine.

I have watched two stores I worked in go away. The customers stayed.

The Dump announced this week it is winding down its stores in Atlanta, the Phoenix area, the Chicago area, Houston and Dallas. Twenty-three years. The stores stay open through their closing sales, and the company says it will keep taking care of the orders and warranties already on the books.

That is hard news for the people who work there. Good stores, good people, and then one day it is gone. I have watched that happen twice.

Here is the part nobody talks about.

When a store closes, its customers do not leave town. Somebody who bought a sofa there still needs a bed next year.

Over the next few months, every independent in those five markets is going to get a stranger who used to shop somewhere else.

Nobody is going to hand you her name. There is no file coming with her. She walks in once.

Whether she ever comes back depends on whether anybody in your building gets her name the first time.

Is your store in one of those five markets?

09/13/2026

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09/12/2026

Stand in your own front door for ten minutes tomorrow and count.

Count how many people walk in and get spoken to like a guest, and how many get spoken at from across the room.

Carl Sewell sold cars in Dallas. I bought eight or nine of them from him over the years, all off one walk in, and I never priced another dealer. Not once.

It was not the cars. Everybody has the cars.

He was obsessed with things that had nothing to do with the sale. The customer bathrooms had real paintings on the wall and got cleaned every hour. So did the ones the technicians used, which is the part that tells you it was real. Anybody can clean the customer restroom before a visit.

You cannot fake the back of the house.

Here is what that has to do with your Saturday. Your floor is doing exactly what it does when you are not standing there, and the difference between a store people come back to and a store people forget is not on your price tags.

It is whether the person nearest the door gets up.

Ten minutes. Front door. Count.

How many out of ten got a real hello?

09/10/2026

Some of my best RSAs came up through the back end.

Not all of them. I have had plenty of good ones who never touched a truck.

But the ones who came up through the back knew things you cannot teach on a Saturday morning.

They knew what a scratched leg costs, because they were the one who scratched it. They knew why a delivery ran late, because they had been on the truck when it did. They never once promised a customer something the warehouse could not do.

That last one is worth more than any close I could teach them.

A customer forgives almost anything except being told a date that was never real. The people who loaded the trucks know which dates are real.

My first job in this business was sorting stock in an upstairs warehouse in Phoenix with no air conditioning, in the summer. I would outlast the help. Not because I was tougher. Because I wanted somebody to notice.

Somebody in the back of your building is doing that right now.

Who on your floor started somewhere else in your building?

09/09/2026

One review you think is unfair will cost you more sleep than a bad month.

A bad month is math. You can look at a bad month.

The review is somebody describing you in public, wrong, where your next customer reads it, and there is no counter you can put in the same size type.

Owners do not talk about this one out loud. It sounds thin. You are a grown man with a payroll and you are lying there at one in the morning over four sentences from somebody who would not take the exchange.

I have been in this business forty seven years. I have watched it eat at people who were very good at everything else.

Here is the part that actually matters, and it is not about your feelings.

You are paying for ads to send a stranger to look you up. He looks you up. The first thing he reads is the angriest thing anybody ever wrote about you, and under it, nothing. No answer. No name. Nobody home.

That silence is not neutral. It reads as agreement.

You cannot delete it and you cannot argue it away. You can answer it, in public, like a person, within a day. That is the whole move, and almost nobody does it.

When was the last time anybody answered one of yours?

09/08/2026

A week ago I asked what your plan was for today.

I doubt anybody wrote it down.

Here is what happened over the weekend. People walked into your store who had never been in it before. They came for the sale. Some of them bought.

Every one of them left you a name, an address, a phone number and a delivery date.

That is the only thing you got out of that weekend the chain across the street cannot copy by Friday. They matched your percentages. They outspent you on the ads. They will do nothing at all with the names.

I know, because I worked for them.

Today those names are three days old. In two weeks they are cold, and in two months they are a list nobody wants to open.

The sale was the easy part. The sale is over.

What happens to those names is the whole rest of it, and it happens now or it does not happen.

Did anything go out to your weekend buyers yet, yes or no?

09/07/2026

If your store is open today, I know exactly where you are standing.

Near the front. Watching the lot.

Labor Day is one of the biggest furniture weekends of the year, which means it has never once been a day off for anybody in this business.

Somebody on your floor gave up a cookout to be there. Somebody on your truck is on his second delivery before noon.

They are not doing it for the holiday pay.

I am not going to tell you anything today. Go find those two people before you close and say something to them that is not about the numbers.

Are you open today, or closed?

09/06/2026

I bought every system that promised to remember my customer.

Not one of them ever called her.

Furniture Today ran a piece last week telling home furnishings marketers to connect their customer signals, their business intelligence, their brand experience and their measurement into one system.

That is right. I am not arguing with it.

I ran nine Ashley HomeStores and twelve Levitz Mattress stores at the same time. I bought the systems. We connected the data. I could pull a report on any customer who ever walked through any of those doors.

And she still did not hear from us.

Not because the system failed. The system worked. It sat there holding her name, her delivery date and what she paid, waiting on somebody to do something about it.

The missing part was never the software. It was the call.

A system remembers. It does not care. Caring is somebody picking up the phone on a Tuesday when nothing is on fire, or it is a machine doing it on that person's behalf because the person got busy.

Every store I have ever walked into has more information about its customers than it uses. That is not a technology problem and it never was.

The big guys are not better at this than you are. They just have something that does not forget on the days everybody is buried.

So before you buy one more thing that promises to remember her.

How long has it been since anybody in your building reached out to somebody who already bought from you?