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A blizzard outside didn’t stop the heated sales inside at House-Hasson Hardware’s January dealer market, which was held Jan. 21-23 at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
House-Hasson Company president Don Hasson says sales were up 5 percent over last year’s market, even with the bad weather.
“We give the dealer market excellent marks,” Hasson says. “It was a great kickoff to the year, even though Friday, Jan. 22, was a blizzard, and a market Friday is typically a very strong day. If dealers hadn’t arrived by Thursday, they weren’t likely to make it until Saturday. Nashville doesn’t often see 10 inches of snow.”
Even more retailers ordered from the market floor using CipherLab scanners, which sends a dealer’s order directly to the House-Hasson system without paperwork, contributing to the sales increase.
“The ease of ordering electronically means that dealers order more of what they need, because the system works so smoothly and takes less time,” Hasson says.
The heavy snow resulted in a new experience for some dealers, he adds. “Several of our dealers from the Caribbean Basin were outside making snow angels. They had never seen snow before.”
Travel through Music City was so difficult the band hired for Friday night’s entertainment couldn’t make it from one side of the city to the other.
“Instead of a band, we had one guy with an electric piano and a mixing board, but people stayed just as long, danced as much, and had just as good a time,” Hasson says.
House-Hasson’s next dealer market is scheduled for June 16-18 at the Sevierville Events Center in Sevierville, Tennessee, just outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
