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Three Dirty Little Secrets
GlobalShop, the retail design expo, had its three-day extravaganza in Las Vegas the middle of March. Like Euroshop, its continental counterpart, it is a gathering of brick-and-mortar assets: flooring...
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Walmart Can Crush Amazon
I described Amazon a while ago, as “PacMan,” gobbling up everything in sight, including big chunks out of Walmart. Well, that’s about to change. Walmart can literally crush Amazon. Or at least it can...
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Amazon Acquires Sears
If you have any doubts, just wake up and think about it. It’s a win-win for both Jeff “Get Big Fast” Bezos and Eddie “Take the Money and Run” Lampert. Amazon gets roughly 2400 US stores (or...
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Made Up in the USA
When Walmart announced last year it was going to launch a major push on domestically-made products—helping to fund some of the suppliers, in fact – it set off a jingoistic feeding frenzy. All of a...
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Three Strikes and He’s Out!
Strike One Spotty performance going into the recession and poor performance coming out. Target Stores and its web business have been poorly positioned from a merchandise trend and strategic standpoint,...
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Dear Doug – An Open Letter to Doug McMillon, the New President & CEO of Walmart
By now you’ve been in the corner cubicle in beautiful downtown Bentonville for a few weeks, so congratulations on being only the fifth president in the history of Walmart. It’s a big job, running the...
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Housekeeping
The summer is usually not a time for great reflection: more often most of us spend as much time as possible getting away from the real world, via vacations, trashy novels and the latest super-duper...
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Amazon: Trouble in River City?
Or Wall Street’s Magical Leprechaun Jeff Bezos does have that “Leprechaunish” look about him. Wall Street certainly bought into the fable that Mr. Bezos (symbolically toiling over his “shoe making”)...
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Whole Foods Market: Conscious Capitalism or Unconscious Greed?
So are we adding a luxury food brand to the “designer derby” of racers seeking more growth (for its own sake) by reaching down to consumers who are reaching up? Or is the CEO of Whole Foods, John...
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Wellness on the Verge of a Revolution
The past 50 years have seen a transition in healthcare from the Marcus Welby model of a kindly physician taking charge, even ownership, of a patient’s well-being to a phenomenon called participatory...
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Walmart Collateral Damage
What if Walmart opened a big fleet of new-format stores and no one came? We might find out really soon. After years of tinkering with its small-format, food driven Neighborhood Market model, Walmart...
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Memo from the Grinch: The Gas Price “Bonus” is an Empty Tank
Economists, experts, analysts, consultants, a lot of CEOs, casual observers and even my friend and CNBC regular Jan Kniffen believe lower gas prices are going to goose holiday retail sales. In what...
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Around the World with Paco Underhill
What We Can Learn From Emerging Markets Merchants have a temptation to move up-market. We suspect this is a reflection of their desire to seek higher margins. While we can applaud the successes of...
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State of the Union
No, this isn’t the latest dispatch from the war-torn Middle East or the Ukraine, and the bunker here is a well-appointed lawyer’s office or a suite at the local Hilton. But warfare is an apt metaphor...
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A Holiday Fable
‘Twas the day after Christmas, when all through the mall, Every shopping creature was stirring in a big free-for-all. The sale banners were hung in the windows with twine, In hopes that black ink would...
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The Past as Prologue
I recently spent some time looking 25 years into the future of retailing. Coincidentally, I played this game almost 25 years ago, exactly. I think it was July of 1989 when I was an executive at the May...
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Target Canada’s Ill-Fated Adventure
In what has to be one of the biggest retailing fiascos of all time, mass merchandiser Target has closed its 133-store Canadian division less than two years after it opened. Billions of dollars were...
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Fiddling with the Roofs
Remember the old adage that “retail follows the rooftops”? If you do, then you probably have fond memories of the Eisenhower administration, the post World War II suburban building boom when Sears...
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Haggen’s Big Buy
In the brutal business world, the seemingly impossible sometimes happens: The small fish swallows the big one. This reversal of fortune usually happens when a small company acquires some or all of the...
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