Accentuate The Positive!

Editor’s Note: To commemorate Shooting Industry’s 70th year, we’re continuing our look at content published through the decades. Long-time contributor Dick Miller wrote the following in his monthly “Selling The Shooting Sports” column (which has some rich themes we will look at later this year). Advice from July 1962 holds true today for us in this “relaxed” sales environment. Agree/disagree? Weigh in! editor@shootingindustry.com

Some of the best advice ever given to a shooting goods retailer came from a song writer. Remember the song that said “accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative?”

I don’t think the song writer had our business in mind when he wrote those words, but intentionally or not, he gave us some good and much-needed advice.

That we should accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative was never more clear to me than on the occasion of some dealer calls I made recently.

Is Griping (And More Griping) Good For Business?

When I walked into one man’s store, he was sitting in a chair behind the counter, in solitary splendor. His clerk was unpacking and tagging some merchandise. When I put the inevitable question, “How’s business?” I got a lengthy lecture on the current perils of retailing, complete with dissertations on price cutting, discount houses, I-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale, dwindling market, poor crops, poor weather and poor everything. The only thing lacking was an organ, softly giving out with a dirge in the background.

Although his business has been there nigh on to 30 years, he couldn’t see how he was going to make it another year. And maybe he was right. Trouble was, I couldn’t see that he was doing anything about it, except griping.

It is said of military men that a little healthy griping improves morale, but I fail to see where it can improve the state of a man’s shooting goods business.

I might have left that town filled with compassion and sympathy for that poor, unfortunate shooting goods retailer, caught up in a swirl of increasing competition and changing methods, if I had not made another stop, about 10 blocks down the same street.

A Very Different Outlook

It was some time before I could talk with the second dealer, because he was busy with customers, in the store and on the phone, plus giving instructions to clerks. When I put the “How’s business?” to him, I got a fast and enthusiastic, “Good!”

Without naming names, I indicated to him other retailers in the area were disturbed by such gremlins as price-cutters, discounters and wholesalers, not to mention poor weather, crops and business in general.

The answer he gave me is the key to this whole column.

I was informed that, by the time he took care of his own business, he didn’t have time nor inclination to worry about what the other fellows were doing. He indicated he felt the competition was big enough and old enough to do their own worrying, and darned if he was going to do it for them.

He felt that there was business to be done, and he was doing it. Sure, he agreed, he might do more business if the conditions listed did not exist, but his goal was to get his share of the business that was to be done, and he was doing that.

What About You, Retailer?

In a few words, the second dealer was accentuating the positive, and eliminating the negative from his thinking. More people have more time and more money, and are buying more shooting goods tan at any time in recorded history.

What about you, Mr. Shooting Goods Retailer? Are you doing business by accentuating the positive or are sitting in a chair behind the counter, giving out with negative pronouncements on everything from motherhood to Christmas?

Now that this column is written, I suddenly remember that it is directed at the wrong people. The shooting goods retailer who regularly reads this magazine would not be guilty of negative thinking. I apologize.

But if you have friends or know of someone who is infected with the dread disease of negative thinking, won’t you remind them that it’s always better to accentuate the positive?

It’s better for business, too.

Dealers, what is your outlook for the rest of 2025? Weigh in: comments@shootingindustry.com.