AURORA | Retail stores used to be able to count on one advantage to get them through the tough times: The American shopper’s desire to spend.
Over his decades as an executive at retailers like Sunflower Market, The Walking Company and others, Rick Hettlinger saw those shoppers’ tendencies firsthand.
“It used to be you could always count on the America consumer to spend, and it’s not so much the case anymore,” said Hettlinger, the new chief financial officer at Goodwill Industries of Denver. “Everyone has gotten a little more frugal, a little smarter.”
Hettlinger, who started at Goodwill in February, arrives in the secondhand retail world at a time when — despite resellers doing well after the recession — a more-frugal consumer base is forcing stores such as Goodwill to look for ways to lure shoppers in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Hettlinger said that during and after the recession, thrift stores like Goodwill were among the industries that did relatively well.
“That helps us being in the thrift business because when times are more challenging there are more people driven toward thrift, and that’s great,” he said.
Even as the economy has improved, Hettlinger said shoppers have remained cost-conscious and that has continued to help.
According to the Association of Resale Professionals, a trade group that represents secondhand retailers and thrift shops, the industry is growing at about a 7-percent clip each year and now accounts for several billion dollars in sales around the country.
Locally, Goodwill Industries of Denver, which has several facilities in Aurora, saw retail sales top $63 million in the fiscal year that ended in June 2015.
But, Hettlinger said, shoppers still aren’t heading to retailers the way they once did, which has led to some for-profit retailers seeing year-to-year dips in sales, and some significant store closures.
A prime example of shoppers’ frugality, Hettlinger said, is the fact that sales haven’t ticked up at a time when shoppers are saving money at the gas pump. Rather than taking those dollars that they don’t have to spend on gas and spending it on retail, he said many are instead saving it or paying off debt.
As shoppers have grown more frugal, other retail outlets have started battling for those same dollars that thrift stores typically received.
Hettlinger said a key to competing in that atmosphere having resellers look like any other retailer. That means making sure the stores are clean, welcoming and have stocked shelves — all the retail rules he learned in the for-profit world.
“Retail is retail,” he said.
Kristen Blessman, chief marketing officer at Goodwill Industries of Denver, said Hettlinger is the organization’s first CFO in her eight years there with extensive for-profit retail experience. That experience means Hettlinger can take a forward-looking approach that considers what a company will look like several years down the road — an approach she said resellers like Goodwill haven’t had to take in the past 100 years.
Today’s economy has meant not just more pressure on the retail side for secondhand items from online retailers, but also on the donation side. There are apps and online services today that make it easy for people to sell items that they might have otherwise donated to Goodwill, Blessman said.
For Hettlinger, who has long volunteered for nonprofits but always worked in the for-profit world, the shift to the nonprofit side has been rewarding, and one he hopes marks his last stop before retirement.
“I really don’t have any appetite to go back to for-profit,” he said. “This is too rewarding.”