MC Sports

For my retail store evaluation I went to the MC Sports in Kalamazoo, a sports (and hobby) gear store. The store addresses a wide range of costumers. Anyone who wants to shop for almost any sport can go to MC Sports.The store contains gear for sale for hunting, fishing, snowboarding, skiing, canoeing, soccer, golf, basketball, football, track, tracking, etc. and also weight-lifting gear. They sell general sports items like thermal gear too. Therefore, they market to anyone who is interested in any sport.

From the outside, the store is not appealing. It has a industrial look with grayish colors and sharp edges. Also, the gates are not very user friendly. The entrance is through two layers of doors; two double-doors as the first layer and three double-doors as the second layer. Although the existence of more than one door, and all the doors being double widens and frees the space available for entrance, they are also disadvantageous. First, to enter the store, the costumer needs to go through two doors rather than one. Also, two of the doors in the inner layer are in the middle while one is on the left, and there is a huge canoe inside the store, in the middle of the middle doors and the door on the left. So it is almost as if the door on the left opens to another section of the store. This might cause confusion on the costumer. When the costumer goes through one of the doors in the middle, there are items on the way narrowing further movement into the store.

The display of the merchandise also fails in a few points. First of all, there is merchandise everywhere, the store is overcrowded. With the addition of lack of labeling and sings the it is very hard and tiring to find what one is looking for. There are some obvious sections in the store which are distinguishable like the hunting and the canoeing section, however, the others are not noticeable. Also, the footgear section is shoved all the way to the back, which is impossible to see from anywhere in the store because of the high shelving throughout the store. While I was looking for weight-lifting gloves to buy I was completely lost, so, I asked a staff member. He directed me to another staff member, who just directed me to a huge part of the store and told me that the gloves "should be somewhere there". Although MC Sports describes their staff as a "friendly knowledgeable staff " on their website, I have reason to disagree. On the other hand, there are helpful signs also, for instance, near the socks section, there is a informative board indicating the relationship between shoe and sock size, which extremely helpful for me while shopping.

After a nightmare of shopping, the cashier area relaxes the costumer a bit. There are not that many items blocking the path or limiting movement, but just enough. However, one always has to go through the troubling doors to leave.