[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 121 (Tuesday, October 3, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9696-S9697]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   IN PRAISE OF FRED WILBER, BUCH SPIELER AND CYBERSELLING IN VERMONT

 Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I want to congratulate Fred Wilber 
from my hometown of Montpelier, Vermont on his cyberselling success.
  For the last twenty-seven years, Fred Wilber has owned Buch Spieler, 
a music store in downtown Montpelier. Recently the New York Times 
reported on Buch Spieler's growing sales from its Internet site at 
http://www.bsmusic.com. Mr. President, I ask that the full text of the 
New York Times article of September 22, 2000, titled ``The Opposite of 
Amazon.com,'' be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.
  The success of Fred Wilber is a shining example for all Vermont small 
business owners to follow. By taking advantage of the new markets 
offered by the Internet for its goods and services, Buch Spieler has 
increased overall sales by 10 percent and expanded its customer base by 
20 percent in the last year and a half. For years we Vermonters have 
complained about not having access to a major market to sell our goods. 
Now through the Internet, we can sell our goods in the blink of an eye 
to anyone in the world as Fred Wilber and Buch Spieler have shown.
  I commend Fred Wilber for being a cyberselling leader and tapping 
into the Internet's world markets.
  The article follows:

               [From the New York Times; Sept. 22, 2000]

                       The Opposite of Amazon.com

                          (By Leslie Kaufman)

       For 27 years, Fred Wilber has run a quirky music store 
     called Buch Spieler in downtown Montpelier, Vt., population 
     of roughly 8,000. The store, which sells out-of-print movie 
     soundtracks, among other goodies, has had its ups and downs, 
     but in 1998, as Internet music distributors like CDNow and 
     MP3.com exploded in popularity, Mr. Wilber began to worry 
     that the Web would be his Waterloo.
       His answer was to build his own Web site (www.bsmusic.com). 
     Designed by his brother and lacking time-saving features like 
     one-click shopping, it is hardly slick. But it has been 
     successful.
       In the year and a half since the site went into service, 
     Mr. Wilber says overall sales have jumped 10 percent. Just as 
     important, he estimates, the Internet has expanded his 
     customer base by some 20 percent. It turns out that Mr. 
     Wilber's peculiar tastes have been strengths on the Web. When 
     the site was recently sent an e-mail message requesting the 
     score from ``Gordy! The Little Pig That Hit It Big!'' a 1995 
     movie, he simply took it off the shelf and shipped it.
       ``It is not easy e-commerce,'' Mr. Wilber said of his Web 
     site. ``But we are not trying to compete with Amazon. We 
     focus on our own niche.''
       To many experts, the advent of the Internet seemed to 
     signal a grim future for mom-and-pop retailers. Increased 
     competition and the availability of a diverse array of 
     merchandise to populations that had been essentially captive 
     audiences threatened to erode their customer base.
       But a survey of more than 1,500 businesses in 16 downtown 
     commercial districts nationwide, released earlier this month 
     by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, indicates 
     that the Internet can spur sales in storefront retail 
     businesses. Just as they compete in the brick-and-mortar 
     world against big-box enemies like Wal-Mart Stores and Home 
     Depot, small retailers seem to do best in the virtual world 
     by focusing on unusual products or aiming to give excellent, 
     personalized customer service.
       The National Trust is a nonprofit organization that 
     develops programs to support and maintain historic downtown 
     areas. And because the survey canvassed only merchants in 
     towns where some revitalization of historic downtown areas in 
     under way, the National Trust said its results probably 
     overstate the positive impact of the Web on all small 
     businesses. Even so, the news was surprisingly upbeat.
       The trust's survey, one of the first in the nation to 
     examine the impact of e-commerce on small retailers, found 
     that some 16.4 percent of Main Street businesses it polled 
     were already using the Internet to sell things. Further, the 
     survey found, merchants that sell online--with most of them 
     starting their Web sites only within the last 18 months--have 
     experienced a 12.8 percent increase in overall sales. On 
     average, 14.3 percent of their total sales are now 
     attributable to the Internet.
       Small, specialized businesses ``are really starting to 
     gravitate toward the Web,'' said Kennedy Smith, director of 
     the National Trust's Main Street Center. ``The thing that was 
     a surprise was the extent to which it was helping them.'' For 
     a struggling storefront operation, a 5 percent increase in 
     sales can make the difference between shutting its doors or 
     staying open, Ms. Smith said.
       The news about small storefront retailers presents a stark 
     contrast to larger, purely e-commerce retailers. Many experts 
     once suggested that even individual entrepreneurs working out 
     of homes and garages--selling everything from books to bow 
     ties--would prosper on the Internet as barriers to entry were 
     eliminated. But as it has turned out, while several of these 
     pure e-retailers had jumps in sales initially, they are now 
     struggling to make money as the challenges of

[[Page S9697]]

     marrying cyberspace and the real world have become clear. 
     Hundreds of these operations are now cutting back or going 
     out of business entirely.
       Established name-brand retailers, so-called clicks-and-
     mortars, have also had their share of tribulations on the 
     Internet. While many have recorded strong sales through their 
     online arms, it has often come at enormous cost. To sustain 
     the level of service associated with their stores, most big-
     name retailers have had to do everything from hire new 
     workers to set up a separate warehouse operation to handle 
     the orders.
       There is no way to know exactly how many small storefront 
     merchants do business over the Web, but their ranks are 
     already in the tens of thousands and growing. As of May, some 
     29 percent of all American small businesses--from retailers 
     to public relations firms--had Web sites, according to the 
     Kelsey Group, a consulting firm specializing in local 
     advertising and e-commerce. That is up from 23 percent in May 
     of last year.
       Of this Web-connected minority, almost half are selling 
     goods over the Interent, according to the Kelsey Group, which 
     gets its information from a survey of a national panel of 600 
     businesses with fewer than 100 employees.
       The use of the Web by small retailers is likely to 
     accelerate because many larger companies, hoping that small 
     businesses could be revenue generators, have been 
     intensifying efforts to bring mom-and-pop stores online over 
     the course of the last year.
       Last September, for example, Amazon.com started zShops, a 
     service that allows small businesses to have a link to their 
     products pop up when a visitor to Amazon clicks on a relevant 
     book or compact disc. A seller of spice grinders, say, could 
     arrange for a link to appear every time a person clicked on a 
     book about Indian cooking.
       Web developers of all sizes--from Microsoft to tiny outfits 
     run by a couple of a guys in a college dorm--are offering 
     small businesses access to a range of Web services, from Web 
     site design to purchasing banner advertising. In fact, the 
     business of providing Web services to small operators has 
     already become competitive enough that many of the mom-and-
     pop retailers said their entry costs had been very 
     reasonable.
       James and Mary DeFore, for example, own a women and 
     children's store called Unique Boutique in downtown 
     Thomasville, Ga., a small city of about 20,000 people. They 
     were doing a healthy side business in prom dresses, and 
     decided that if they offered them on the Web they might 
     attract rural customers who could not get into town. So last 
     January, they hired a local service provider, who for a few 
     hundred dollars designed a simple but colorful Web site with 
     the catchy name Time for Prom (timeforprom.com).
       The site went live in February, and by march the DeFores 
     were getting up to 40,000 visitors to their Web site each 
     month. By June, they had nearly 500 orders for dresses that 
     cost $150 to $200. And requests came not just from rural 
     areas in Georgia but also from Missouri and West Virginia and 
     even Hawaii and Japan. ``The biggest problem,'' Mr. DeFore 
     said, ``was fulfilling all the orders.''
       Despite not having a powerful brand name or being linked to 
     a powerful portal like Yahoo or America Online, Time for Prom 
     shows that small retailers need not get lost in the vast 
     clutter on the Internet if they develop a clear, arrow 
     identity.
       In fact, another Thomasville retailer, Hi-Fi Sales and 
     Service, which specializes in equipment for home theaters and 
     live field recording, did $1.9 million in business over the 
     Web last year, which represented a significant portion of its 
     total sales, and now gets some 30 percent of its new 
     customers online with no advertising.
       The key to the success of Hi-Fi Sales is making sure it is 
     visible. ``We spend a lot of energy making sure we come up 
     high in the search engines,'' said Jim Oade, one of the three 
     brothers who co-own the business. Each search engine has 
     different rules for deciding in what order to list businesses 
     related to key words, he said. So one of the brothers, Doug 
     Oade, devotes himself, among other things, to keeping current 
     with the rules and making sure the company's Web site 
     (www.oade.com) has enough of the right key words to pop up 
     swiftly when a consumer wants audio products.
       The Oade brothers' national customer base is still fairly 
     unusual among mom-and-pop ventures. Most storefront retailers 
     use the Internet mainly for defending and cementing the 
     relationship with customers they already have--a relationship 
     that is very much under siege by giant retailers.
       Osborn Drugs in Miami (pronounced Mi-AM-a), Okal., has been 
     a family drugstore for 29 years. Since it started its Web 
     site in 1996, sales through the Interent have increased only 
     about 5 percent a year, according to Bill Osborn, who runs 
     the store with his father. But more than 90 percent of the 
     traffic on the Web site comes from regular long-term Osborn 
     customers who just like to e-mail their prescriptions in. 
     ``We view it as a way to service customers we already have,'' 
     Bill Osborn said. ``We are not trying to go public as 
     osborndrug.com.''

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