A Fair Deal

Along with their funnel cakes and cotton candy, fairs and expos can provide an ideal business-grooming venue — and an inventive way to reach a relatively untapped consumer base. Just look at Centralia, Wash.-based Hall’s. With four branches in the state, the full-service DME and pharmacy is using state and county fairs as a way to expand its retail business, and its days at the fair are becoming lucrative.

Designating summer as “fair season,” Hall’s hits up to seven state and county fairs and one home show throughout Washington and Oregon. The company stocks its booth with scooters, a power wheelchair or two for demonstration purposes and information on how to obtain lift chairs.

But it’s the scooters that really move. Hall’s sells up to 27 scooters at each fair. Compare that to the six to 12 scooters the company sells each week at all four locations combined. Booth set-up and personnel at one stop on the fair circuit costs around $8,000, but product sales at the venues now account for 5 percent of the company’s annual revenue, which in 2003 reached just over $9 million.

Phil Hall, who opened Hall’s Drug Center in 1959, sold the business to his son Ron Hall, nephew Warren Hall and partner Jon Wiley in 1987. Today, the four locations offer pharmacy products, home medical equipment including service and repair, and gifts. The company provides scooters, lift chairs, power wheelchairs, manual wheelchairs, orthotics, mastectomy and diabetic products as well as other HME items.

“We’re kind of the hometown pharmacy,” says Jonathan Biggers, sales and rehab specialist with Hall’s. “As far as I know, we’re the only independent pharmacy in our area, and we’re the only place customers can purchase HME and mobility equipment within at least a 30-mile drive. People know that not only do we have a pharmacy but they can get wheelchairs, bath aids [and crutches] here.”

Right Place, Right Time

For the past seven years, Hall’s has set up booths at fairs large and small, from the Clark County Fair to the Oregon State Fair and the Puyallup Fair (also called the Western Washington Fair), which purports to be the largest fair in the nation. What makes fair-goers more ready to buy than customers lured into the stores by ads or sent in through referral? According to Hall’s, it’s largely a matter of impulse — and that’s about being at the right place at the right time.

“People come up to the booth with their arthritis bothering them because they’ve been walking around all day, and we ask them, ‘Are you ready to see the rest of the fair on a scooter?’ The scooters are charged and ready to go, and especially at the larger fairs with so much walking, like the Puyallup and Oregon State fairs, [people are] ready to purchase,” says Hall’s DME Sales and Service Manager Parry Albertsen.

“We’ll see the same people later at 11 p.m. who five hours earlier were ready to go home. They’ve got balloons tied to their scooter and are having so much fun their family can’t keep up with them. It’s great to see a 92-year-old man who’s been coming to the fair for 70 years still able to see everything.”

The company markets scooters specifically toward the fair crowd by offering fair specials and discounted prices. “Most fairs will rent scooters, and people will come by in their rental scooters that they’re paying $10 to $12 an hour for and say, ‘I should just buy one,’” Biggers says. “[Customers] in the store know they need something to get around in their home environment, but people at the fairs are looking for something to get around in at the fair, for outdoor use. We market to that environment.”

Fairs have also proven to be ideal spots for attracting future Hall’s customers. Employees set up a power chair for demonstration and can show fair-goers on the spot what the turning radius and other features are like.

“Not everybody’s going to buy a scooter that day, but they’ll say, ‘We’ve been looking at buying Mom or Dad a power chair,’ so we’ll generate leads and make sales days, weeks or months down the road from our fair exposure,” Biggers says. The company usually has a 10-by-10-foot booth but has recently moved to a 10-by-20-foot booth at the Oregon State Fair to accommodate power wheelchair demonstrations.

According to Jack Evans, president of Malibu, Calif.-based Global Media Marketing, displaying and demonstrating products at fairs taps into an important HME market. “A company that sets up at a fair is connecting with a community that doesn’t know which home health care products are available,” he says. “[An HME’s] goal is not just to sell but to show people what kind of medical equipment is available and what it is used for.”

Out of the company’s 54 employees, Albertsen says the fair booths are manned by staff with the most product knowledge and who are also insurance experts. Although the main thrust of the fair booths is retail sales, if a customer wants to pay for a product with insurance, Hall’s is able to start the paperwork right away and can arrange for a home visit, even if the location is far from one of the branch offices.

A Future in Retail

Part of the company’s growth strategy is to exhibit at more fairs, particularly as the business opens new branches. Hall’s is hoping to grow its presence in Oregon and to open branches in other areas of Washington and the Pacific Northwest.

HME makes up about a third of the company’s business but continues to grow, Albertsen says. Historically, the in-store payer mix for HME has been 80 percent third-party insurance. “We are striving toward a bigger retail market, and this is one way to do it. The baby boomers are coming, and they will spend money to be more active. They will not be hindered. When you explain [to a baby boomer customer] the legal process it takes to get a scooter through Medicare, they say, ‘Forget it; I’ll just buy it.’”

If retail is the future, then HME businesses will need to look for new ways to reach a different kind of customer. According to Evans, HMEs would do well to give themselves more retail exposure. “Most HME providers don’t market themselves outside of going to visit referral sources,” Evans says.

“Other ways to do this besides going to fairs include hosting open houses, setting up booths at shopping malls, which often have health fairs, or even rolling products outside onto the sidewalk so people driving and walking by can see them. Our industry doesn’t market itself to the community at large, and I think we need to do more of that.”

Time spent at the fairs has been a morale booster for the staff as well as a boost to the company purse. “We enjoy what we do,” Albertsen says. “If someone decides they want a root beer float or some ice cream, we’ll go out for some — we’re at the fair. We’re having fun, but it can be exhausting. I spend up to three months eating hot dogs, drinking lemonade, talking to so many people.

“We’re a tired group by the time September rolls around. But we can go home and realize we’ve helped people become more mobile, gain some independence — and enjoy the fair.”