Packed By Owner Inventory List: Fill & Download for Free

Why are alcoholic drinks so high priced at bars and restaurants?Restaurants mark up alcohol because it’s their largest margin product by far. I haven’t worked in restaurants since the 90’s but I was the head bartender at one restaurant and was responsible for inventory. The inventory list had our wholesale costs. A bottle of Jack Daniels cost us about $8 and we sold a drink with JD for $4.50 (Jack and Coke for example). We got about 20 shots (maybe 18 to be exact) out of a bottle, so for rough math let’s say 20*$4, or $80 a bottle for something that cost us $8. Beer was marked up by 2–3x and wine 3–5x.They also do it because they can. No one needs to go out to a restaurant or bar and order a drink. Hopefully you don’t need to drink, but if you want a drink you can buy a six pack, a bottle of wine or a bottle of liquor and bring it home. It’s far less expensive. A bar can mark up the price because it’s not a necessity, it’s a choice to go out and have a drink in that establishment. They don’t need to lower their prices because the market allows them to charge what they charge. If people stopped coming they may need to lower their prices.They need to charge what they charge because they have overhead costs. Unlike you buying a six pack and having a beer at home they need to pay rent, labor costs, utilities, insurance, etc. It’s not simply that a bottle of whiskey costs them $8 and they make $72 selling it because they have dozens of costs to cover and the owner wants, and needs, to make a profit. They may like owning a bar or restaurant but they also need to make money to do things like eat.The restaurant business is a low margin business and many restaurants make a little money or even break even selling food and make most or all of their profit on alcohol sales.Rather than making people ask, why don't the list the prices like they do for food?This is from a US perspective. Most bars and restaurants do list their prices, you just have to ask for a wine, beer and/or drink list. Outside of dive or college bars most places will have one with prices listed. I’m not sure if you want bars to list prices on the walls but that would start getting a little out of hand with the number of beers, wines and mixed drinks combinations available.When I was younger, before the craft beer explosion, I rarely asked for a beer menu because there were usually a few things on tap that I could clearly see and the choices were similar everywhere. Now even many mid level restaurants and bars that don’t specialize in beer have dozens of choices so I ask and it always lists the price. Wine is similar and many places have a few unique cocktails on the menu but even then they can’t list every possible drink or their menu would look like Mr. Boston’s bartending guide.Laws and regulations will vary by state and municipalities but if you want to know the prices ask for a menu.

Yes, just like others have told, Drop shipping is legal.Drop shipping is a business method where you (store owner/ retailer) ship products directly from manufacturers or wholesalers to the customer.You don’t need to own a warehouse and pile up the inventories.You only buy products when they are needed, which are then sent directly to the customer.You are acting as a mediator ie., selling the goods on your own store (can be marketplace listings as well) and when you receive an order, you pass that order to the dropshipping company for them to pick, pack and fulfill.In drop shipping, you are only responsible for marketing and sales of the products. Rest of the operations like product, inventory, packaging and shipping are taken care byReference: What is Drop Shipping? How Does Drop Shipping Work?

The Square Market Theory:To organically grow transactions using the Square payment system.To establish a larger premise for consumers to use the Square Wallet.To encourage product sharing by way of social networks, primarily Twitter to generate traffic and sales.To expand use and the promise of the Square Item Library by offering two selling venues, retail and internet. And thereby be perceived as more valuable by the merchant.Simple Questions Can Produce Complex AnswersThere are other direct and indirect, obvious and non obvious parts to the theory of the Square Market, however the points mentioned will standout historically to play central in the thinking. I cannot address information that is not public and otherwise granted to me under confidence. I was asked to answer this question by a friend that currently works at Square, for a number of reasons. I extend my apologies for the detour I feel is needed present this properly. This is really a deceptively complex question that will take a somewhat complex answer to correctly illuminate all the issues at hand.The Tweet that launched Square.Early Square: A Spectacular Success On Many LevelsThe early Square was the example of pure focus and discipline, edited down to the raw essences of the product, the market and use cases. This editing of abstractions and distractions allowed the company to communicate a rather simple message. The first order premise for Square was brilliant and a spectacular success. The premise was to enable and empower micro-merchants to accept payment cards using a smartphone with simple fixed rate pricing. The primary barriers were an inexpensive method to read the payment card’s magnetic strip and the proper relationship with a bank, Visa and MasterCard to allow this activity.The low cost of the original Square Card Reader was critical for wide adoption to low use micro-merchants. However the proper relationships with a bank, Visa and MasterCard was many orders of magnitude more important. Square ultimately created a relationship with Chase/Paymentech and went about lobbying for a new use of the PayPal aggregator model for retail merchants rather then web based merchants. There were a number of other rather important challenges that Square faced and managed quite well.The Micro-Merchant Market Is Huge, Over 25 Million MerchantsOnce a great product is created getting everyone to know about it is the largest challenge, Square was fortunate to have the “Jack Dorsey Effect", a great product and some of the best talent in the Silicon Valley [1]. As the low hanging fruit on the tree, the easy to reach early customers, begin to be saturated (late 2012) the next phase of growth becomes much more costly and rather difficult and many other systems need to be in place to continue the incredible growth required to sustain the current business model.Square has had robust growth since the launch in late 2010. Three years later they went from 0 to 2 million merchants and $0 to about $10 billion dollars in projected annual 2013 Payment Card transaction processing. This is truly phenomenal growth and no matter how you view it, this is an amazing thing. To understand the market size and challenges moving forward from this point in 2013 we need to look deeper in to the Square Market potential. As it stands today, Square has less then 2% of the total payment card volume.Square has achieved 2% of total payment card transaction volume thus far.A vast majority of these merchants are micro-merchants [2]. Square has really defined this sector of retail merchants and it represents a potential of 25 million merchants of which Square current has an approximate marketshare of 2 million thus far.Square has achieved about 2% of the potential micro-merchant market share. They have the largest share of this market segment.Most Micro-Merchants Sell Food, Beverages And ServicesIt is clear that a vast majority of the transaction volume from micro-merchants using Square are in food or service type businesses with no actual products sold. Although Square does not publicly disclose this information this is clear by a number of research studies I conducted since 2011 that this is the case. To be conservative I think one can safely conclude that about 60% of the dollar volume Square processes in payment cards comes from businesses that sell food or service type businesses or do not sell a tangible product, this can be confirmed to some degree by data publicly supplied by Square in the amazing graphic below [3].A slice of time showing the range of merchant types using Square. The size of the circles correlates to transaction volumes.The Two Squares: And The Dream Of A Closed EcosystemWe have established a number of points here thus far, Square primarily is used by micro-merchants that primarily sell services, food or non tangibles in retail settings where the merchant sees the customer. We have established that Square grew spectacularly well thus far but the cost to acquire new merchants has sharply risen. We can also establish that Square had few equal competitors for the early growth but today has about half a dozen equal and aggressive competitors.To distinguish the Square product in what was expected to be an aggressively competitive market, Square developed Tabs, the Square Card Case, Pay With Your Name, Pay With Square and finally the Square Wallet. These are all essentially the same product going through iterations that sadly confused both merchants and consumers. In theory, the concept was to grow both sides of the transaction in hopes to create a closed ecosystem by creating a wallet system to allow consumers to say their name, and mercifully have a useful picture that will allow the merchant to consummate the transaction without the card present.The New SquareSquare spent a great deal of time, money and amazing talent on what is now the Square Wallet, some argue over 65% of the company’s resources where committed to this project. The results have been lackluster at best. The dream to have a closed ecosystem is quite logical on the surface, but a good reading of history and human behavior would have informed founders and executives that lackluster results could have been predicted.This created essentially two Squares:The Square that processes payments for micro-merchants. As mentioned this has been wildly successful.The Square that built a wallet app to create a closed ecosystem. After about 15 months there are few consumers using the system [4].Although the Square wallet produced a great deal of media excitement and attention, it also produced expectations that where far too high. This was a risky bet placed by Square to try to gain wide exposure and acceptance of the Square Wallet concept. However if the "hype factor" produced in the media, especially on general interest shows and news interviews does not meet up with the actual experiences of users a rather negative force develops. An example of this can be seen from the brilliant Reuters technology reporter, Felix Salmon [5]:“Actually, mobile payments are harder than paying with plastic, at least in my experience: the coffee shop I’ve started frequenting near the Reuters office uses Square, which makes paying with a credit card very easy. More to the point, despite the fact that I’ve tried a couple of times, I have yet to get Square Wallet to actually work there. And in general, whenever I try to pay for something using the Square Wallet or some other clever newfangled mobile payment technique, I feel curiously self-conscious and embarrassed about the whole thing. Handing over a card is normal behavior: mobile payments are not. And there’s really no incentive for me to switch.”Square has tried to gain wider acceptance of the Square Wallet by integrating the features of the phenomenally successful Starbucks wallet, namely the QR code system but a vast majority of Starbucks customers see no reason to replace the Starbucks wallet.You Don’t Get Another Chance When A Consumer App DisappointsThe early disappointments of user experiences spans a wide area from a lack of viable merchants using the system, to dozens of local merchants listed that make no sense to be listed in a wallet app (eg. a plumber, chimney sweepers, etc) and operator/merchant confusion and errors. You really don't get another chance when a consumer app disappoints and does not meet up to expectations.There was also that history thing, the history of failed wallet applications that span back two decades, many far simpler then the Square Wallet like Pay By Touch [6], no app, no smartphone needed, you pay with your finger, most of us do not leave home without our fingers, it just worked. But the multi billion dollar company failed in a spectacular fashion seven years later. I can write a rather large book on why these wallets have thus far failed, there is no simple answer.Squareup.com spanning last 12 months with the last image produced in August, 2013. Square has completely eliminated the Square Wallet icon from the front page.A Second Point Of Sale For Retail Merchants: Square MarketThus we have Square at a very critical juncture. The company placed a huge bet on the Square Wallet yet the lackluster results created a fork in the road. Square needed another idea to help create a closed ecosystem this time it would be applied to the merchant side and maybe at the same time silently enroll consumers into the Square Wallet.Surprisingly just a small percentage of the two million micro-merchants sell a physical product that can be sold on the Internet and thus on the outset, Square will have just a few thousand merchants to motivate to participate in the Square Market. The idea is once again quite logical, in theory the merchant already loaded inventory into the Square items list, why not repurpose this for online sales?Let's examine the premise: Retail merchants somehow lack a venue to sell their retail products on the Internet and Square will make it simpler.First off there are over 50,000 marketplaces on the Internet. The two largest are Amazon and eBay with Etsy also in the top ten for micro-merchants. Lets forget about the other thousands of options and focus on these three venues. None of them are broken, and moreover they are all growing wildly. They all make it elementary to present products from micro-merchants. To be clear Square Market is really well designed and easy to use. From a technology standpoint it is a really great product.Square clearly trying to present the Square Market as a first stop to sell online and interestingly not an extension of a new venue for a retail merchant.There is conflict in the marketing of the Square Market. Is it a first stop for an online merchant or a second stop for a Square retail merchant?The question remains, does a retail merchant by default want to be an Internet merchant? Do they want or need this second point of sale? At best the answer is maybe. What are the barriers? A selling venue? A simple Google search will erase this barrier. Then what are the barriers? There are actually quite a few, however the Square Market does not address them in any way, in fact may create more problems for retail merchants.The Exposure ProblemI will illustrate the huge challenges Square Market faces by presenting the Amazon Marketplace [7] and how it goes about solving the real problems retail merchants face selling on the Internet. The Amazon Marketplace allows for any size merchant to sell just about any product, even if Amazon itself already has the item listed. This brilliant product grants the smallest merchant phenomenal power, allowing exposure of the product to the largest group of buying consumers to be found on the Internet. Lets call this the Exposure problem.The Fulfillment ProblemThe next real problem is inventory. If successful in selling on the Internet, retail merchants need space to hold the new inventory and shipping materials. Amazon solves this issue with Fulfillment By Amazon [8]. With Fulfillment By Amazon the merchant would for example send 20 custom hand made iPad cases to Amazon and the company would inventory, list, sell, package, label, ship, track, and bill for the merchant. In many case Amazon will ship this for $0 cost. The merchant just continues to operate the retail business, worries not of the Internet sales and collects regular payments by Amazon. Lets call this the Fulfillment problem.To be sure Amazon charges for services rendered between 6% and 15% in most cases along with a 99¢ per item sold fee.Amazon Marketplace offers retail merchants:Very High ExposureInventory ManagementShipping RelationshipsShipping PackagingShipping labelingLow To $0 Shipping CostsCustomer ServicePaymentsSquare Market offers retail merchants:Limited ExposureEasy Repurposing Of Item Lists, On The InternetPaymentsSome Retail Merchants: Not Selling On The Internet, On PurposeA vast majority of retail merchants that do not already have a selling venue on the Internet may very well have concluded that the cost to get exposure and the cost to fulfill orders may not be worth the time and effort and distracts them from there primary business. I do not come about this by guessing, this is in fact the case as I have discovered empirically over the last ten years.Amazon, eBay And Etsy Are Not Broken, They Just Work- WonderfullyThere is no doubt that Square Market will cost less then Amazon Marketplace. However, Amazon performs far more functions. It is not trivial for busy small retail merchants to close their businesses and to pack up and go to Staples to buy shipping boxes, correctly pack these boxes, print out labels and then drive to the Post Office for the random Internet sale. How much is this worth? Millions of small merchants say it is worth the additional cost to have Amazon do this work, perhaps better than they could.There is no doubt that the Amazon shopping cart experience is not he most beautiful experience. However the world has voted with their wallets and pronounced Amazon to be the success that it is.The Online Indie BoutiqueAnd there is always the very successful and quite beautiful Etsy platform for the merchant that wants a smaller boutique selling experience that has a huge market reach in some product types. The Etsy platform offers merchants a far more rich set of tools. It also offers the highest customer traffic for boutique shoppers.Square missed the real reason we all go to Etsy, it’s all about the artists and artisans, not just the product. In the images below, one can see many reasons why Etsy is so successful but one profoundly important element is the artist and artisan is weaved into each selling page. With Square Market it is missing, replaced with empty open spaces and an almost generic presentation of a single product. The Square Market is not an improvement in any way over the Etsy experience.Same product Square Market vs. Etsy. Clearly Etsy has a more mature and rich approach. Note the many viewing options of the product along with serendipitous display of similar products from the store owner.Does It Do It Better?In the face of these realities, it is really quite fascinating that Square feels strongly enough that they can compete with Amazon, eBay and Etsy. It is interesting that the Exposure Problem and the Fulfillment Problem were not addressed before the launch of the Square Market. Without the tremendously large volume of potential customers that Amazon, eBay and Etsy produce, Square Market is not solving the Exposure problem. In addition without inventory, packaging, labeling, shipping, tracking, and customer service, Square is not solving the Fulfillment problem.Is It In The Cards, Twitter Cards?There is no doubt that Square is betting on the premise that easy integration with Twitter Cards [9] a method that allows third-party developers to make tweets more structured and uniform across all platforms and allows inserting things like photos or video inside the tweets themselves. A part of this integration is the Twitter’s Product Card [10]. Square allows the merchant an easy way to tweet out a link to one of their items for sale in the Square Market, and that tweet will look much fancier in the Product template. The user then click through the tweet back to the merchant’s site on Square’s website.Specimen of a Twitter Product Card.This is not new and just about every commerce site either has this ability or will soon. Etsy has had this feature for some time. However one can safely conclude that this does not really solve the Exposure problem in any meaningful way. Since its inception people have had grand dreams of Twitter commerce and thus far it has not produced a satisfying product discovery experience for consumers. In fact this very deficit created Pintrest. Pintrest understands this in is building it's own commerce platform.Abstractions And Distractions And The Missing EditorBy their very nature startups must find ways to expand growth and unearth revenue. And at the same time there needs to be an artist's eye to editing abstractions and distractions that can very well be fatal to long term success of the company (I am guilty of not editing myself, this posting is a good example). The most successful startups had this constrained discipline. By laser focusing on real problems a startup can have the highest chance not to miss the real opportunities.So why does this ultimately matter? Square took a great deal of time, brilliant talent and lots of investor capital to build the Square Wallet and now the Square Market. History will show that these abstractions and distractions dulled what was a highly focused editor’s eye on the true markets and true mission.One example was to completely miss the first mover advantage in the international market for the primary Square product, the Card Reader. When Square finally enters these markets in a serious way, they would have been nearly three years too late. This delay caused a number of very well financed and formidable local competitors. This delay allowed PayPal to methodically enter these markets with much higher name recognition. The combined effect of local competitors and PayPal in these international markets has greatly injured Square’s ability to continue the pattern of spectacular growth.History Informs The Law Of Gravity Of Business ProductsOne way to help in the editing process is to have a wide and firm grasp of history. In the case of Square they entered in to an industry, merchants selling things, that is perhaps 8000 years old, but most recently has been changed by the plastic payment card. They are in an industry, retail payments, that is really not "broken", the payment card, just works. Thus it is immensely important to work with people that empirically understand the merchant, people that have actually spent decades with merchants and perhaps (gasp) sold useful solutions to these merchants.Sadly history and empirical non-technical experience is not considered to be useful in the Silicon Valley. Ironically history will show that this disconnect from reality, when marketing business products and/or business services will have cause countless products, services and ultimately companies to fail. Understanding the deep history of an industry allows one to understand the law of gravity that operates in general and in particular for business products.Even Great Companies Can Make Great MistakesTo be clear Square is certainly not the only company to make these type of mistakes and will certainly not be the last. I have a particular love for the company, the original mission and the really talented people that have created an amazing product. I was informed of the plan of the Square Market a number of months ago by people that work at the company and later some merchants that participated in the launch of the product. I vigorously tried to offer insight on why this was a distraction. When it was finally announced, I had to be be honest about the problems they faced [11]. This posting is not presented to break anyone’s sprit, in fact, I present it to raise the sprit of the amazing people that have built this company and to point out that there are ways to find the right path again.Endless OpportunitiesThe Square Market would have been a great idea in 1999 and perhaps in 2008, but in 2013 it really does not address nor solve the problems that retail merchants face trying to sell products on the Internet. Square has a rich and wide opportunity to solve real problems and real issues retail merchants face, I have identified over 30 issues that Square could solve today. The Square Market and the Square Wallet are solutions for problems that clearly these merchants do not have.Solve the real problems these merchants face and the opportunities and true growth are endless._____[1] Brian Roemmele's answer to How is Square signing up new merchants without a big field sales force?[2] Brian Roemmele's answer to What types of merchants have adopted Square in the greatest numbers?[3] Brian Roemmele's answer to What is the distribution of Square merchants in the US?[4] TechCrunch Disrupt: Watch It Live! | TechCrunch[5] Why mobile payments will never take off[6] Pay By Touch[7] Amazon.com Help [8] Amazon.com Help: Fulfillment by Amazon [9] Get more from 140 characters[10] Product Card | Twitter Developers[11] Unfocused And A Distraction: The Square Market. by Brian Roemmele on Accepting Payment Cards