To make a business, any business, successful you have to have customers. Continuous customers, loyal customers, who keep your revenues up and keep them steady. Retail stores are a buzz with how to win the customer. How do you get the consumer in the door to spend as much money as they can?
             As we do in many aspects of business, you have to start with the basics. A small, family owned grocery store in Syracuse, New York, has made customer loyalty their business. They keep the same consumers coming back time after time. How did they do this? With a little of today's technology added with a lot of old fashion public relations.
             Almost any grocery store you visit has a rewards program. A card that saves you bucks. Spend this much and you'll save this much. Two for one specials and buy one and get one half off. Green Hills Farms just took all those programs one-step further. The owner took those bar coded cards and built a database of his customer. Who were they? Where did they live? How often did they shop? But once he built this database he wasn't quite sure what to do with the database.
             His little family grocery store, which is totally owned by immediate members of the family, was a quaint store with friendly people. But he wanted it to grow. And the competitors, chain grociery stores, were starting to be built all over the town. How was he going to keep his regular customers and entice new ones? He devised a very simple plan. He was going to be just like the large corporation stores but with a personal touch.
             Green Hills Farms set out to know eighty percent of their customers on a first name basis. They used those cards that got scanned at the checkout. Each time, the customer name would come up and the cashier would address the individual. It was contagious throughout the departments of this little grocery store with even the managers getting to know everyone. That was nice, but it didn&ap...