Data Collection: No Dashboard, Just an Ironing Board

As if to renounce one more convention of business, a Berkeley-area businessperson I know couldn’t find data, so he went out and got some of his own. He had to evaluate market areas.

For three days, he stood by an ironing board with a map on top in front of the Cheese Board in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto. Each customer coming in or out got handed two stick-on dots, red to mark home and blue to mark work. His map quickly revealed patterns and commute routes.

As if to renounce one more convention of business, a Berkeley-area businessperson I know couldn’t find data, so he went out and got some of his own. He had to evaluate market areas.

It was easy. “Everybody’s curious,” said Terry Baird, who had made a career of cooperative/collective food retailing. He had sold advertising for 10 years, and later found himself appointed to unravel the bankruptcy of a once-huge food distributor, an experience he calls “my MBA.” He approached it all without training, only logic and nerve, such as with the ironing board. “It’s like running a three-card monte. A group gathers around you.”

In 1996, he was part of a newly formed collective inspired by the Cheese Board. The new collective trained there as they decided on the new store’s location.

Terry’s question: would any of the proposed locations for a new store overlap another store’s market area?

In three days, he had the answer. On weekdays, none overlapped. But on Saturdays, all did; that’s when people drove in from all over the Bay Area.

The best software might be the kind made without starch.