Discount Retail Store Services Snakes in Sheep Clothing Las Vegas Nevada

Warning: Let me start by saying, if you are considering opening up a retail store, please, I repeat please do not use Discount Retail Store Services nor their financing. There is a 95% chance your store will not survive 6 months.

Discount Retail Store Services, they are very smart, nice, and deceptive all at the same time. If you have great credit or at least enough credit to get them paid; thats all they are concerned with. They will use every sales pitch to sucker you in to open your own store, knowing that you won't have enough operating capital to keep your doors open 3 months (so sad).

They are scamming you from the very first moment you speak with them. Yes, I must say that they deliver well when it comes to building you out a beautiful store, but other than that don't believe all the other hype. Especially the long term support and training is a joke, the initial training is a joke. Trust me if you have the desire to open a retail store, you can get better training on youtube and reading articles on google. 

Anyway, I went through them to open my retail store. At the beginning I do remember being pressured by R**h in the finance department to use their financing; they called and emailed seems like me everyday until I decided to go ahead an use their financing, which is a third party company named Seed Capital. They charge you around $3k - 5k to open up multiple lines of credit (credit cards) in your name; they also have you to falsefy and lie about your current income to secure higher credit limits; which was a Red Flag, but I ignored it because I trusted that these people, and considered them to be experts because of the amount of stores they have opened in the past, and I felt that they had my best interest at hand; boy was I wrong. Once you receive these multiple credit cards; they have you to liquidate about 95% of the credit on them, by using the cash advance checks in order for you to pay Discount Retail Store Services.

After you successfully go through the financing, you move on to Real Estate, in which they are suppose to help you find a great location for your business to succeed. All of the locations they provided me were in high crime and run down areas and I totally disapproved. Now I see why they suggested these sites, landlords in those areas are more eager to rent and this would speed you through their process quicker and they get paid. Well I was not going to fall for that, so they had to work a little harder. After I narrowed down 3 locations I approved of, they reached out to the landlords; as you know landlords are very slow with following up and negotiations. Out of the 3 spaces I approved only 1 landlord had followed up in a reasonable amount of time; and St**e at DRSS pitched to me this is a great location, "this is what we call a power shopping center" "the demographics are through the roof" "you will do very good here". So I trusted their judgement, because #1 im paying them almost 100k and number #2, I felt like they had my best interest at hand. So I signed a contract for that space, as a matter of fact it was a 5 yr contract, I was very concerned about this lease, but DRSS assured me that this was a good lease and that I would do great in this location.

So after I finished the Real Estate phase, I went on to Operations, where they actually do the store blueprint, layout, and buildout. This process was horrible, due to the fact renovations on my retail space were not completed on scheduled time, and all of my merchandise was being shipped. I would actually have to blame my landlord for this issue, because he was in charge of renovations; but DRSS were the ones communicating with him on my behalf.

The store buildout went well. The supervisor did a great job with getting the store completed in 5 days.

So here is where the classic bait and switch come in at: Your store is up and running now and DRSS has received their pay and they literally leave you out to crash and burn. Like i mentioned earlier their ongoing support and training is horrible, its a joke. Their empolyess dont have a clue about running a successful retail business.

After several months of ripping and running; going through the process of opening your store; now you have a little down time because customers are not coming in your store, inspite of all the advertising, social media campaigns, coupons, word of mouth, etc; you can't do nothing but sit back, analyze and count up the real cost. This is the point when the $hit hits the fan. So about 3 months after being open and having and optimistic mindset that things would get better; I started researching how much it would cost me to open another store in the future, if I did it on my own. I started pricing store fixtures, merchandise, and etc that I had in my store; I could have fainted after I found out this stuff is dirt cheap. Another thing I started to do was price the inventory that was in my store to see what it added up too. According to my contract with DRSS, I was supposed to have $20k worth of merchandise at wholesale price in my store; hmm I was having a hard time trying to even get to $20k at retail after pricing over 90% of my inventory. Take in mind, yes I had been open for about 3 months; but my sales were through the floor, horrible, less than $7k for that time frame.

I then started to research this company and reach out to other business owners. I soon learned that over 90% of the stores on their website are out of business and the owners had to file bankruptcy. The few that are still open are struggling to stay open just to keep from going bankrupt.  All of the business owners I have talked with have similar stories about DRSS. 

DRSS does not have your best interest at hand; they will try to get much money as possible out of you as they can. For instance; they receive a commission off of your lease from your retail space, they use your good credit to get paid upfront, they invite you to Vegas to visit their office for bull$hit training. 

I have so much more I could say, but I just want to warn anyone who wants to open a retail store to do it on your own. You can do it 75% cheaper than DRSS can and save a lot of money for operating expenses until your store traffic picks up. Talk with other business owners, if you are not their direct competition, they should be willing to give you good advice; hire you a good business attorney before you sign a retail space lease, make sure the lease favors you as the business owner. Take your time and don't rush into being a business owner; its a huge responsibility and will a lot of your time and energy.

DRSS store concepts do not work, I dont care how smart you are or how business savvy you are. DRSS store concepts do not and will not work; you will end up in Bankruptcy in less than 1 year of your store opening.  Unfortunately, I had to close my doors after only being in business for 6 months.

DRSS prey on people with good credit who have a desire to open their own business. They make it sound like you need them to do this; all at the same time they are knowing that you will fail. The failure rate using DRSS is very high due to the large amout they scam you out of using your credit, i mean they max your credit outt. You have no room to borrow funds down the road because your debt to equity ratio will be to high. DRSS doesn't care though, why? Because they have gotten all of their fees up front and could care less if you succeed or not. The amout you will be paying on your lease and the lines of credit per month, and other operating expenses will leave you dry each month, as a matter of fact my store never even got to the point of breaking even. I was using personal savings to keep the business going, while also trying to live and take care of my personal life. Within a few months my personal funds were drying up; and the store was showing no signs of improvement, in spite of all my efforts to keep it afloat. My sales were so horrible, if I didn't have any expenses; it still would not have been worth operating the business. I believe they lead me to a location that was not the ideal location for the type of business I had; also the demographic of people in that community were not friendly to minority owned businesses (I learned that after the fact). DRSS main goal is to get you in the quickest location as possible, to keep the ball rolling and them getting paid.

I have so much more, but I will stop here. You have been warned, PLEASE BEWARE!!!! Do not use DRSS.