Shifting Gears for U.S. Car Buffs
If your idea of car heaven is 130 types of motor oil, a 10-speaker DVD entertainment system with screens for every passenger or an $8,000 set of 22-inch custom wheels, your road to nirvana might lead to Stanton.
The Orange County city is home to Super Autobacs, Autobacs Seven Co.’s first outpost in the United States. The mega-store member of Japan’s biggest and trendiest auto parts chain opened last summer, and dozens of car clubs have made pilgrimages, crowding the parking lot with red-hot Hondas and neon-bright Nissans in impromptu weekend auto shows. Their visits, in turn, have spawned lots of Autobacs chatter on the Internet.
For all that, something got lost in the translation. The store isn’t the smash hit that Osaka-based Autobacs Seven hoped it would be.
Autobacs, founded in 1948, has 533 stores in Japan and 10 in other countries. The one in Stanton, with 35,000 square feet of space, is almost twice as big as the typical store operated by Pep Boys -- Manny, Moe & Jack. That was one reason Autobacs’ U.S. debut was eagerly anticipated by hordes of import auto fans, who felt left out when they visited conventional auto parts stores and found little to excite them.
“The original idea was to take a Japanese store and plunk it down in California, unchanged,” said Bob Donnelly, marketing director for Autobacs USA, which has 60 employees. “But some of the products don’t make sense in the U.S.”
One early shipment included fancy cup holders designed to fit on the driver’s door -- and in Japan, the driver sits on the right side of the car. The right-hand cup holders haven’t been big sellers in Stanton, Donnelly said, pointing to a display of unsold items.
When the store opened, it featured a 12-foot-long rack of custom automotive ashtrays. Smoking is far more prevalent in Japan; a popular Japanese fashion accessory is a tiny ashtray worn suspended from a chain around the neck and used because it is considered impolite and unsanitary to flick ashes into the street.
“We got rid of 8 feet of ashtrays,” said store manager Larry Blake, “but we’ve still got a lot.”
And Japanese retailing concepts are different. Items are displayed by category rather than purpose, so car washing and waxing materials initially were on one aisle and sponges and cloths several aisles away.
After several months of tinkering, many Japanese elements of the store have been reworked. One big addition that U.S. executives insisted on was a section for sport utility vehicle accessories and performance parts.
“They don’t have SUVs in Japan, so they hadn’t thought of it,” Donnelly said.
Executives of Autobacs USA say that although sales volume growth is off to a slowish start, it is still within the goals set for the store’s first-year performance.
“We could hit $8 million this year,” said Blake, a veteran of Pep Boys, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Chief Auto Parts, now part of AutoZone Inc. That figure would translate into annual sales of about $230 a square foot. By comparison, Pep Boys’ 629-store average for 2003 was $169 a square foot.
The big draw at Autobacs remains a dizzying array of auto parts. Among the more than 130 types of motor oil are high-tech oils made specifically for Honda and Nissan engines. (The Honda oil goes for $8.33 a quart, about four times the price most of us pay.)
Customers can pick from several dozen styles of custom wheels, including 22-inch chrome monsters that sell for $2,000 apiece. And there are $500 racing seats, $2,000 front suspension systems, $4,000 superchargers, $33 Hawaiian print seat covers, $20 pints of Japanese car wax and $6.95 cleaning brushes curved to fit a tire’s outward-bulging side wall. One aisle features a 24-foot-long rack of clip-on rearview mirror extenders, all labeled in Japanese.
Autobacs is fairly well known among import car performance buffs because it sponsors several international race teams and is a big force in the new Japanese-born sport of drifting -- a kind of tire-smoking automotive ballet in which drivers gracefully slide their cars around a track in controlled skids, with rear ends constantly on the verge of swapping places with front ends.
The retailer’s name recognition, however, hasn’t necessarily opened customers’ wallets.
On a recent weekday lunch hour, employees outnumbered customers, several of whom said they were merely looking things over.
Although still enthusiastic about the scope and variety of goods, customers like Darrell Ruivivar, 34, have found that Autobacs’ prices tend to be higher than those at nearby tuner shops and at online retailers.
Ruivivar, founder and president of the Team Scion West club for owners of Toyota’s new Scion brand cars, visits the store about once a week, he said. “I usually buy something, but the prices are high.”
Ruivivar said he didn’t mind paying the premium, though, because he wouldn’t have to wait for his purchases to be shipped. “You’re paying for instant gratification,” he said.
Nearby tuning shop operators, initially fearful that a big-box store with Autobacs’ reputation could hurt business, are more at ease.
“We’ve found that ... their prices are 10% to 30% higher than ours, [so] they don’t really compete with us,” said James Donnelson, owner of Drift Speed, a tuning shop in Westminster.
Donnelly acknowledges that prices on some of Autobacs’ items aren’t as competitive as he would like to see.
“We have only one store here now, and we can’t do the direct purchasing that you can do if you’re AutoZone or Pep Boys,” he said.
Autobacs does deal directly with manufacturers of its Japanese market goods and its tires and stereo equipment. With other products, Donnelly said, the company has to go through manufacturers’ local representatives. That slows delivery, as does the 5,500-mile pipeline to Japan, and increases costs.
The store’s Japanese roots caused one oversight that Donnelly said still needed to be addressed. Import autos in the United States, especially in Southern California, include a large number of European cars, and Autobacs doesn’t yet stock much for them.
“This is a work in progress,” said Donnelly, likening Autobacs’ initial foray into the United States to the first, stumbling steps of the Japanese automakers in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Like Toyota and Honda, he said, “we intend to be successful and to grow.”
