CrossCheck Blog

Now that pending home sales have hit their highest level in nine years, building supply and landscaping nursery owners and managers may want to prepare for homeowners improving their property for sale. Today, selling a home requires that most homeowners consider their house as a commodity with a certain value that they must present in as attractive a light as possible – and you are the retail resource that can help them the most.

We associate the 1960s with the Baby Boomers, but since members of that generation were still being born in 1964, the Civil Rights, Free Speech and “give peace a chance” movements were really pushed forward by the oldest Boomers, in their teens and twenties when the last members of their generation were still in the cradle.

Part of Pixar’s cleverly subversive 2008 hit movie, Wall-E, takes place on a gigantic spacecraft where society resembles life on a cruise ship. People never need to rise from their mobile recliners, so most are overweight and largely fixated on the next thing they can suck out of a cup with a straw. The two kids in this still don’t even look at each other to talk, preferring to engage the ever-present screen floating in front of them.

CrossCheck is proud to be an all-American company and it’s almost comical how well we fill the caricature that comes to mind when you imagine what that means. We raise money for charity and give food to the needy. When we hit sales goals we wear jeans to work. We have barbeques and ice cream socials. We’re located in a small town. And we’re proud of our local industries. When most people think of Sonoma County, they think of wine, but Petaluma got its start as a dairy town feeding a hungry San Francisco during the Gold Rush, and dairy is still one of our biggest industries.

College basketball fans rejoice, selection Sunday this weekend kicks off a month’s long celebration of March Madness! Truth be told, it even goes into April.

You know this is happening, so before we suggest what you can do about it we'll give you the numbers proving you’re right: Americans visited retail stores 35 billion times in 2009, but that dropped dramatically to a mere 25 billion a year later. And it kept dropping, year after year, until by 2013 we made a paltry 17 billion visits – about half as many four years earlier. Yikes! That certainly seems like a rough turn of events. But…if Americans visit retailers half as often, then how come half of retailers didn’t go out of business?

The best sales strategy for the next few months may be to position yourself for an entire year of sales. Just how to do that starts with understanding your market, and acting now to respond. Sure, fifty-three times last year Wall Street closed at a record-breaking high, but for Main Street the year meant enduring something of a shaky nail-biter, with severe weather numbing its start and jittery non-committal customers keeping it from settling down.

Since stockbrokers like to have a number for absolutely everything they invented an index to measure fear, called it the “volatility index,” and gave it the ticker “VIX” on the New York Stock Exchange. When it goes up, something is wrong, and when it goes haywire we’re in the midst of a crisis. So this is exactly what you want to see going into the holiday season:

Expert Salespeople Matter Like Never Before in Retail & Webrooming Supplanting Showrooming The paradox of online shopping has finally snapped. Once upon a time shoppers thronged to the web to get instant gratification in the form of tantalizing Tweets and photos and videos and reviews which would all culminate with an inspired, self-defining selection and the thrill of buying an awesome new thing – only to end up not having it. Instant gratification decayed into shipping options, and the free one takes the longest. The waiting seemed interminable. You can only reappraise the Tweets and the photos so many times. “Liking” reviews starts to feel overly hopeful. The days drag on, and still no box.

We know why you’re here: you’ve been researching merchant account and payment processing options and have become so confused that you just want someone to sum up the “bottom line.” Given all the legal wrangling between the credit card processing companies and a number of huge retailers, it can be difficult to discern what’s changed, what hasn’t, and which of those things matter to you.