Klarinet Archive - Posting 000002.txt from 2006/12
From: "Rommel John Miller" <rjmiller@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] WWBW Bankruptcy -- to set the record straight
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 02:15:28 -0500
You missed the forest for the trees, as music stores goes, they WERE the
Walmart or K-Mart of the Music world, and they had the inventory that hardly
anyone else could match. And even I said I was happy with most of the stuff
I got from them. But they did gobble up Music-123, if they didn't own it out
right, which I really think they did, the websites were too identical to be
different companies, and as I said before, orders from Music-123, although a
New Jersey based super-store, came from South Bend, IN.
And what really contributed to K-Mart's downfall? Some suggest an
over-enthusiastic commitment to merchandising the Martha Stewart line, and
not actualizing the projected profit margin.
Now, it waits to be seen what really caused WWBW to declare its own travels
into Chapter 11, but suffice it to say, something had to have gone awry, and
something significant to cause a collapse of this magnitude. The
colloquialisms "biting off more than they could chew" or "burning the candle
at both ends" come foremost to mind.
And see, it is companies like Walmart and K-Mart that are supposed to bully
the mom and pop shops out of business, I mean that is the major complaint
against Walmart, especially in rural America. And that is precisely what
companies like WWBW and Music-123 and Musicians Friend have the intent of
doing, under-cutting the local mom and pop's by offering near wholesale
prices on the internet, no taxes, only shipping and handling fees.
Ideally, this is the dream of the dot com empire. To operate a business as
Amazon.com does where you sell your inventory at a low margin, reap a
considerable margin on shipping, and marketing fees from publishers and
reinvest in the company. Jeff Bezos knew how to do it.
Perhaps the music world is such that manufacturers do not yet see the web as
an advertising tool for their products, and as the retail presence on the
web as an advertising presence also, entitled to incentives to promoting
their product, and perhaps that is where WWBW/Music-123 lost revenue.
I don't know, I really don't know, all I can do is speculate, and that is
all I can do. And I can defend myself and my position by responding to the
points many of you either don't understand or don't agree with. But each of
us are entitled to our respective and subjective opinions, and I respect
yours and I sincerely hope that you will respect mine.
Thank you.
Rommel John Miller
308 Dale Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21206-1219
410-668-4784
410-967-8994 (cell)
rjmiller@-----.net
"More Tears have been shed over answered prayers, than over unanswered
ones."
--St. Theresa of Avila & Truman Capote
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Fay [mailto:kevin.fay.home@-----.net]
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2006 1:48 AM
To: klarinet@-----.org
Subject: RE: [kl] WWBW Bankruptcy -- to set the record straight
Rommel John Miller posted:
<<<Something is more rotten here than meets the eye, for WWBW was too big,
too massive, too much a presence like K-Mart or Walmart to suffer this
defeat, some deeper, unknown and nefarious reason for its demise must be at
the source of its fall.>>>
Huh? Kmart filed for bankruptcy in 2002, leading to their merger with Sears
in 2005. It had $17 billion in assets when it filed for Chapter 11
protection. Was this the result of being "nefarious," or perhaps just some
poor inventory management? It's very possible to be big and go broke.
WWBW is hardly a big retailer, though. It had what - two stores? While
they're big in the mail-order music business, perhaps, as retailers go they
are tiny.
A *single* Wal-Mart averages over $50 million in sales per year. (There are
over 6,000 of them.)
I bought a ton of stuff from WWBW over the years - a clarinet, two
saxophones, a flugelhorn and a closet full of mouthpieces and other stuff.
They could be slow at times, but I always found them helpful.
kjf
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