OF COURSE the consultants, marketing flacks and other optimists-for-hire have a million reasons why the one-store, family-owned retailer can Fight the Corporate Megastores and Win!
Who believes it? Guerrilla marketing, thinking outside the big box and "the five-step technique guaranteed to bring customers back to your small business time and time again" will always get swept away by Wal-Mart's, TV-ad tsunami and big-screen TVs for $350.
Everybody knows this. National chains have been bankrupting Main Street merchants since Sears met Roebuck, and when the Florida-based Music and Recording Superstore opened in Catonsville in 1998, it wasn't hard to predict eventual silence for mom-and-pop music stores across Baltimore's west side.
Mars, as the chain called itself, had the space of a supermarket, the wallet of a tycoon and the instincts of a barracuda.
The Appalachian Bluegrass Shoppe, two miles away, had the space of a shoebox, the clientele of a religious shrine and an owner who had worried about this day for a long time.
"We knew it was coming. The writing was on the wall," says Appalachian Bluegrass proprietor Emory Knode. "I had been reading all my trades and paying attention to what was happening. I had been studying the superstores entering a lot of other industries. It was just a matter of time."
Down the street, Bill's Music House owner Bill Higgins had just acquired a second building, more than doubling his space and adding a fat layer of overhead. The Mars landing came at a bad time.
"Obviously, I had some concerns about what was going to happen," says Higgins. "But I had a good team, and we weren't about to buckle under in any way."
Bill's and Appalachian Bluegrass had anchored for decades a Catonsville music scene that was sometimes compared, with exaggeration, to Nashville's Music Row. Mars was started in 1996 by the former boss of Office Depot, a company in the business of shredding smaller office-supply stores like an Enron audit document.
Mars had already put a store in Parkville, and another national chain, Guitar Center, had just opened in Towson. Worse, the Internet was blooming, and local instrument stores were losing business not just across town but in Michigan, California and other distant spots.
In 1998, Mars marched directly on Knode's and Higgins' hometown, buying acres of ad space and shipping industrial quantities of guitars, trombones and sheet music to Catonsville just before the holidays.
"It was pretty much shock therapy. It was like somebody had turned off the oxygen," says Knode.
"They just saturated the mail and the airwaves with their deals," Higgins recalls. "That hit us the first year. It put a crimp in our sales, and here we had building No. 2 ready to go."
Then the little guys got busy.
Higgins expanded his brass and woodwind departments and started offering lessons again. Knode added Martin guitars to his lineup and, obeying Sun Tzu's counsel to know your enemy, read Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's autobiography, Made in America.
Both stores cut prices and minded what is any boutique's advantage over the superstores: service. They made sure to keep an ample complement of smart staff, and Appalachian Bluegrass employees got lessons in phone etiquette and handing the paid-for merchandise to the customer instead of placing it on the counter.
Mars cut prices even more. Like all the "category killer" retailers, Mars was founded on the notion that price matters most, that customers will spend a lot on gas to save a little in the store and that it's more important to fill shelves with a lot of merchandise than the sales floor with a lot of expert staff.
On Sept. 27, Mars filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. A month later, it decided to liquidate, ceasing business.
It's not clear that resistance from the likes of Bill's Music and Appalachian Bluegrass was a key factor in Mars' defeat. Mars and Guitar Center did help put several Baltimore-area stores out of business. Mars made many mistakes and, in a demonstration that music superstores are viable, Guitar Center makes money, has more than 100 stores and remains a threat to the mom-and-pops.
But for now, in Catonsville, the conventional wisdom is unratified. Bill's and Appalachian are doing more volume than before the superstores arrived, and shoppers have proven that sometimes they are more than price-driven automatons.
When Mars died, Knode thought about walking down Catonsville's Frederick Road with a bottle of champagne to share with Higgins. But he didn't want to gloat. And the holiday season loomed. There was work to do.