The Levitz Agency

The Levitz Agency 47 years running furniture stores — Phoenix to New York to Dallas. Founded by Michael Levitz.

Now I help independent furniture & mattress retailers nationwide sell more to the customers they already have, and get their time back.

Retail grew six percent last month. Furniture grew one point nine.So the money is out there. It is going somewhere else....
09/26/2026

Retail grew six percent last month. Furniture grew one point nine.

So the money is out there. It is going somewhere else.

When a month went bad on me, we did not go buy more traffic. We went backward instead.

We would go into the customer database, and into the salespeople's own records, and pull names. Then we put a promotion in front of people who had already bought from us once.

Now here is the part of that sentence that should stop you.

The salespeople's own records. If they kept them.

The database belonged to the house. The records belonged to whoever wrote them. Some of my people had years of names in a book, what she bought, when she bought it, what she said she would come back for. Some of them had nothing at all.

So on the worst month of the year, half my floor could go to work and the other half could only stand there and wait for the door to open.

That is what I want you to sit with. My best play in a bad month depended on whether a grown man had bothered to keep a notebook.

You do not have to live like that anymore. That is the part that actually changed.

How many names could your best salesperson pull right now?

There were no forklifts. That is why I was pushing sofas up a ramp outside, in the Phoenix sun.That was my first job in ...
09/25/2026

There were no forklifts. That is why I was pushing sofas up a ramp outside, in the Phoenix sun.

That was my first job in this business.

M.D. Pruitt's Home Furnishings. I sorted stock in an upstairs warehouse with no air conditioning, in an Arizona summer, and I would actually outlast the help.

Nobody was training me. Nobody sat me down and explained the business.

But you learn what a sofa weighs. You learn what it costs somebody to get it up a ramp. And you never forget it, because your back remembers longer than your head does.

Here is why I am telling you.

Most owners I know came up on the floor or came in from outside. Very few of them have spent a summer in their own back end.

So when the warehouse is slow, or a delivery goes out wrong, they are guessing about work they have never done.

The people doing that work know exactly who has done it and who has not. They can tell in about a week.

You do not have to push the sofa. You do have to know what it weighs.

When was the last time you were in your own warehouse?

A man bought his kid a bed this week and never talked to a single person.He said so himself, in public. He used an AI to...
09/24/2026

A man bought his kid a bed this week and never talked to a single person.

He said so himself, in public. He used an AI to find a loft bed with storage underneath, searched for a long time, and came away happy with what he found.

Nobody in our business got a shot at that sale. Not because he was avoiding us. He just never had a reason to walk in.

Here is what a good RSA would have asked him.

How would you like your son to try it first before you buy it?

That is it. That is the whole thing.

No machine can answer that question. It is a bed his boy is going to sleep in for years, and his father bought it off a screen, because nobody offered him the one thing a store has that a screen does not.

I am not against the technology. I use it. It should be handling your follow-up, your reminders, the customer who has not heard from you since delivery.

That is the busywork. Let it have the busywork.

What it should never be doing is the part that only works when a person is standing in a room with you.

Does anybody on your floor ask a question like that?

A video with 240,000 views is telling your customers what they are actually paying for.The man who made it has 2,470 sub...
09/23/2026

A video with 240,000 views is telling your customers what they are actually paying for.

The man who made it has 2,470 subscribers and has never run a store.

It is called 10 Furniture Stores Ranked Worst to Best, By What You Are Actually Paying For. A quarter of a million people watched a stranger explain your pricing to them.

For years I was the one who set the prices and approved the discounts on a sales floor. So here is what is actually in that number.

The freight to get it into the building. The warehouse it sat in while she made up her mind. The truck and two people to carry it into her house. The floor sample she sat on first, which nobody will ever pay full price for again. The one that comes back. The commission. The rent on the room she walked through to find it.

Almost none of it is the sofa.

None of that is a secret and none of it is shameful. It is what it costs to have a store she can walk into.

But she does not know any of it. And right now she is learning it from somebody who has never paid a freight bill in his life.

You can let a stranger explain your price to her. Or you can do it yourself, once, in plain language, before she asks.

One of those builds trust. The other one costs you the sale and you never hear why.

Has a customer ever asked you why it costs what it costs?

"We don't put prices online because we want them to come into the store."I ran stores for forty seven years and we never...
09/22/2026

"We don't put prices online because we want them to come into the store."

I ran stores for forty seven years and we never did that once.

We went the other way. We put a price guarantee on it. If she found it cheaper somewhere else, we made it right.

The thinking is not complicated.

She is going to find the price anyway. She is standing on your floor with a phone in her hand. The only question is whether she gets that number from you or from somebody who is not in the room.

If she finds it somewhere else, you are losing an argument you were never part of.

If she finds it from you, with a guarantee sitting next to it, the price stops being the conversation. Now she is deciding on the things you are actually good at.

Hiding the number does not make her drive over. It makes her assume the worst about you and buy from whoever told her.

I understand why people do it. It feels like protecting something. It is not. It is handing the last word to a competitor.

Do you have your prices on your website?

I have bought eight or nine cars from the same place. I never once shopped anybody else.They earned that on my first vis...
09/21/2026

I have bought eight or nine cars from the same place. I never once shopped anybody else.

They earned that on my first visit.

This was Carl Sewell's dealership in Dallas. He wrote a book about how he ran it, called Customers for Life. He was not guessing. At one point he had the second largest Cadillac dealership in the country.

I walked in one time. After that I never priced another dealer, never took a Saturday to go look around, never called anybody to see if I could do better.

Think about what that was worth to them.

One walk-in, and then eight or nine cars over the years without having to win me again a single time.

Now here is the part that should bother you, because it bothers me.

I spent forty seven years selling furniture, and I could not tell you we ever did that to anybody. We fought for the first sale. We ran the ad, we paid for the traffic, we trained on the close.

Then she took delivery and we let her go.

A car dealer figured out the second sale is cheaper than the first one. Most of our industry still has not.

The first sale costs you money. The second one costs you a phone call.

How many of your customers have bought from you more than once?

The stores closing this year didn't fail. Neither did mine. I just left.Nobody asks what you do on the Monday after.I so...
09/20/2026

The stores closing this year didn't fail. Neither did mine. I just left.

Nobody asks what you do on the Monday after.

I sold my stores in 2019. The hardest part was not the paperwork, and it was not the number.

It was standing in a room full of my own people and telling them I had sold.

I had hired most of them. I had been in front of them for years. That morning I was the one with news they never asked for.

The finances were fine. Everything on paper worked.

Standing there, I knew I had probably made a mistake.

What I was starting to see is that the people who bought us were not the same people after the sale that they were before it.

Here is why I am bringing it up now.

A lot of stores are closing this year. McKinstry's was 168 years old. Youngs was 95. Bostic Sugg was 90.

Read the coverage and you would think the business beat them. It did not. The owners were ready to be done.

That is not an industry failing. That is a generation leaving.

And the part that never makes the announcement is that the decision looks like a spreadsheet right up until the morning you have to say it out loud.

If you are anywhere near that decision, and a lot of you are, do not let it be only a number.

Sit with the room first. The number will still be there.

Who would you have to tell?

09/19/2026

The first time I met Mattress Mack, he was moving a sofa.

Not supervising it. Moving it.

Jim McIngvale started Gallery Furniture in Houston in 1981, in an old model home park on the North Freeway. The company is still registered as Gallery Model Homes.

Everybody in Houston knew him from his commercials. And there he was on his own floor, with his hands on a sofa.

I have met him several times since. That is the one I remember.

Here is what it has to do with your Saturday.

When the owner carries the sofa, nobody on that floor gets to say it is not their job. The customers see it. The people who work for him see it.

Most independent owners I know would carry the sofa too. That is not the problem.

The problem is the owner who is not on the floor at all. He is in the back answering emails, chasing a delivery, writing the thank you notes that should have gone out last week. All of it matters, and none of it is where the customer is.

Your customers do not need to see you do everything. They need to see you.

Where were you standing at eleven o'clock last Saturday?

Ninety percent of the people who worked for me are not there anymore.Somebody bought the stores. Nobody can buy the peop...
09/18/2026

Ninety percent of the people who worked for me are not there anymore.

Somebody bought the stores. Nobody can buy the people.

The stores sold in 2019. Most of the people did not stay.

I am not writing this about the buyer. I am writing it about what anybody thinks they are getting when they buy a store.

You can buy a building. You can buy a sign, a lease and a list of names.

You cannot buy the reason those names came back.

We treated our people as good as we treated our customers. That was the whole thing. The customer never saw our org chart. She saw whether the person helping her wanted to be there.

And when the good ones leave, she feels it. She could not tell you why. The store looks the same. It just is not the same place.

This is not only about selling a company.

Every time a good associate walks out of your store, a little of what your customers come back for walks out with them. Nobody writes that down. It does not show up on a report until it shows up in the numbers.

The building is the easy part to keep.

How many of your best people have been with you more than five years?

09/17/2026

Same floor. Same traffic. Same product.

Some salespeople still had good customers when it was slow. Some did not.

Years ago I handled pricing and approved discounts on a sales floor. I was not selling, so I started noticing what the salespeople were doing.

The ones doing well kept cards. Notes on people they had talked to, people they had sold, and everyone they had a relationship with.

When the floor was slow, they still had good customers. The others did not.

I saw it work and fail on the same floor.

That was before anybody had a computer on the sales floor. The tool changed. The job did not.

Here is the version for your store. Every associate should be able to answer three questions without digging for anything.

Who did I talk to this month who did not buy?

Who did I sell in the last year?

Who has not heard from us since delivery?

If those answers only live in somebody's memory, they disappear the day that person is out, busy or moves on. If they live somewhere, your slow Tuesday has names in it.

The cards were never about being organized. They were about not starting from zero every morning.

How many past customers heard from your store last week?

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Arlington, TX

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