Solar Store To Open
September 27, 2008 by Noel
Filed under Green Living
There are a lot of stores which offer products that make use of solar power. However, these stores are not actually the type that mainly sells solar products. In fact, they would sell solar products among a wide variety of other products.
But there is a store that is soon going to cater mostly to solar products and this store is going to be known as Open Sky Energy Systems. This is owned by Ben Williams, Michael Matotek, and Joe Coyle. They are going to open the doors of their store come September 29 and this is going to be located in Swarthmore.
Williams is the store’s head for technology and he says, “Mike and I have been talking about this for quite awhile. There’s all sorts of problems in the news… wherever you want to look about oil prices and electrical prices and fossil fuels and nuclear plants. We talked about it quite a bit, and finally Mike’s like, ‘Why don’t we do a company to do solar power?’”
Its a great thought, but not such a great idea. In order for a store to survive they have to have marketshare and customer base big enough to thrive. This store will have all these great things, but they won’t be able to build enough of a market to stay afloat fast enough. That will lead to them having outrageous prices. The overpriced goods will in turn hurt public oppinion on solar power.
In order to get solar into every home we need to get solar into every store, not into specialty stores. Think about modern bicycle shops. They are selling mountain bikes for eight to ten times as much as you can get a huffy from a department store.
These guys would do better focusing on a distribution business idea. Its a common business mistake to think you have to open a store to the public to profit. If they could put together a line of products and get it on walmart shelves everyone would benefit.