When Samuel Perez started looking for a location for his new business, he knew he wanted a site in an upscale neighborhood with good visibility and reasonable rent. That his business is selling caskets and that he picked a spot in the heart of Lakewood speaks volumes about the almost surreal nature of retailing these days. And it also explains why, for the most part, anyone who wants to buy a pair of pants still has to get in the car and drive to a mall.
Perez owns Caskets Direct, which sells caskets, markers, vaults and liners direct to the public. These sorts of things used to be purchased directly from a funeral home in a package with a burial plot, embalming and the like. But over the past decade or so, an industry has emerged that sells caskets at prices 30 to 60 percent less than funeral homes — a considerable savings when someone is spending seven or eight grand for a casket.
Call it the free market at work, albeit in a slightly macabre way.
Which means a discount casket store needs many of the same things that other high-end retailers need in a location.
“I was looking for a spot in an upper-end part of the city,” says Perez, whose merchandise includes top-of-the-line, U.S.-made brands such as Batesville and York.
“I wanted an educated audience in a high-traffic area in a nice location.”
Hence the four-month-old Caskets Direct on Abrams, across the street from the Minyard’s and up the block from the Lakewood Shopping Center. So far, says Perez, it has been a terrific fit, with sales already at the break-even point and his customers everything he had hoped for: intelligent, affluent and interested in saving money.
Which raises the question of how Perez figured all this out when so many other retailers — local, national and regional — don’t seem to have a clue about the value of neighborhoods like this one. Empty cotton fields in Frisco or Grapevine, where there are more businesses than people, they understand. But here, where they can’t level a section of prairie and put up a warehouse-sized store, presents much scratching of heads and rending of garments.
Part of the reason Perez knows this is that he lives in the neighborhood, near White Rock Lake .
“Hey, this is a great place to do business, whether you’re selling caskets or anything else,” he says. The other reason is that he has a completely different perspective than most retailers. He looked at the area and saw what it had — all those well-educated, well-off consumers — rather than worry about what it didn’t have. It’s the latter that seems to stymie so many other companies, who panic if a neighborhood’s demographics don’t exactly match the forecasts on the spreadsheet.
And since this is an urban neighborhood with — heaven forbid — some people who don’t fit on the spreadsheet, retailers run for Frisco at the first opportunity. But not all national retailers, of course. Starbucks (though it pains my cranky ex-newspaperman’s soul to admit this) has discovered how lucrative Lakewood is. So has Target, which never gets enough credit for its business acumen in these days of Wal-Mart this and Wal-Mart that. And considering that Lakewood and
East Dallas had one proper drug store below Mockingbird not that long ago, that there are now three national chains here means someone is paying attention.
In fact, if some analysts are to be believed, the shopping mall may be on its way out. The recession has battered department stores, and land costs for prime space are skyrocketing. The current darlings are called lifestyle centers, not unlike Mockingbird Station or the West Village . Developers note that shoppers enjoy being able to park in front of a store, run in, and run out — something that’s not easy to do at a mall.
This, of course, is not news to Perez, who chose his location for just that reason. It’s also not news to anyone who lives around here.
