Retail Day Quotes

It was February sixth: eight days until Valentine's Day. I was dateless, as usual, deep in the vice grip of unrequited love. It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year's Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids in their windows by January second to rub it in.

You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.

It was bad enough not having a boyfriend for New Year's Eve. Now I had to cope with Valentine datelessness, feeling consummate social pressure from every retailer in America who stuck hearts and cupids on their windows by January second to rub it in. (Thwonk)

So you're the winner of this game show," Seth says, "and you get a choice between a five-piece living room set from Broyhill, suggested retail price three thousand dollars— or—a ten-day trip to the old world charm of Europe." Most people, Seth says, would take the living room set. "It's just that people want something to show for their effort," Seth says. "Like the pharaohs and their pyramids.

Finally, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November 1863 as Thanksgiving: a day to solemnly acknowledge the sacrifices made for the Union....Shopping was part of the American Dream, too. So in 1939, at the urging of merchants, FDR moved Thanksgiving ahead a week, to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. And there it has remained, a day of national gluttony, retail pageantry, TV football, and remembrance of the Pilgrims, a folk so austere that they regarded Christmas as a corrupt Papist holiday.

To keep myself from harming or calling N and to stave off the rage and despair, I focus on my extraordinary son, drink midrange Chardonnay every night after he is asleep, and make a barrage of late-night mail-order retail purchases placed from the couch. The couch has officially become my second battle station. I am angry and I have credit And I´m all blackened inside; I should wear a pointy witch hat around Larkspur as I go to the bank and drop A off at day care. It would be more honest.

I’ll still be sitting on my ass all day, five blocks from where I graduated, working the same crappy retail job I had when I was sixteen?” I finished for her. “Exactly.” I tried to look hurt. “I find your lack of faith disturbing.

I don’t think any other retail company in the world could do what I’m going to propose to you. It’s simple. It won’t cost us anything. And I believe it would just work magic, absolute magic on our customers, and our sales would escalate, and I think we’d just shoot past our Kmart friends in a year or two and probably Sears as well. I want you to take a pledge with me. I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him. Now I know some of you are just naturally shy, and maybe don’t want to bother folks. But if you’ll go along with me on this, it would, I’m sure, help you become a leader. It would help your personality develop, you would become more outgoing, and in time you might become manager of that store, you might become a department manager, you might become a district manager, or whatever you choose to be in the company. It will do wonders for you. I guarantee it. Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me Sam.

I have often thought that everyone should work in retail at some point in their lives, kind of like mandatory military service. They would understand two things—first, that serving customers all day can be a very difficult job, and second, that being kind is so much more effective than being nasty.

The story ran that Sunday. Because I had not been able to interview him, he didn’t get a mention. It would have amounted to a nice bit of publicity for him, but the other interviews made it unnecessary in the end. I sent him a clip of the piece along with the business card that he had asked for. To this day, I won’t step inside that retailer. I will not mention the name, not because of censorship or a desire to protect any company’s reputation, but because of our cultural tendency to believe that if we just identify the presumed-to-be-rare offending outlier, we will have rooted out the problem. The problem could have happened anyplace, because the problem is, in fact, at the root.

Shopping malls rarely have any windows on the outside. There is a good reason for this: if you could see the world beyond the window you would be able to orientate yourself and might not get lost. Shopping malls have maps that are unreadable even to the most skilled cartographer. There is a good reason for this: if you could read the map you would be able to find your way to the shop you meant to go without getting lost. Shopping malls look rather the same whichever way you turn. There is a reason for this too: shopping malls are built to disorientate you, to spin you around, to free you from the original petty purpose for which you came and make you wander like Cain past rows and rows of shops thinking to yourself, "Ooh! I should actually go in there and get something. Might as well seeing as I'm here." And this strange mental process, this freeing of the mind from all sense of purpose or reason, is known to retail analysts as the Gruen transfer.

Recent evidence confirms that retail prices of essential consumer goods in poor countries are not appreciably lower than in the United States or Western Europe. In fact, with deregulation and "free trade", the cost of living in many Third World cities is now higher than in the United States. My experience in Latin America and Haiti is that the prices of meat, fish and fresh vegetables are about the same as in the United States. Can you imagine eating on less than one dollar a day?

I understand this was a stressful shift for you," she said. "Why don't you take the rest of the day off? You've got some PTO saved up, I think.

When a person who works retail has a day off we don't do nothing for nobody unless you ask nice.

Black Friday – (AKA Zombie Apocalypse) Is an event of subset half-dead human like beings confronted with ravenous bloodthirsty monsters preparing to pummel down the doors mid-afternoon on Thanksgiving Day.

Many people have a stereotype of what it means to be poor. And it may be somebody they see on the street corner with a sign: “Will work for food.” And what they don’t think about is that person who’s struggling every day. Could be the person who waited on us, took our bank deposit, works in retail, but who is barely above the poverty line.

For the record, this is Joe Girard: Most average number of retail vehicles sold in one day--6 Most new retail sales in one day-18 Most new retail sales in one month-174 Most new retail sales in one year-1,425 Most new retail vehicles ever sold in a fifteen-year career- 13,001 Number one retail vehicle salesperson-12 consecutive years Joe's

If you cross examine a child of seven or eight on his day's doings (specially when he wants to go to sleep), he will contradict himself very satisfactorily. If each contradiction be set down as a lie and retailed at breakfast, life is not easy. I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture - religious as well as scientific.

I discovered handbags are made out of just about everything but sheet metal and drywall. Could it be possible that one day women will actually be able to live in their handbags? I think so.

Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous! The spirit of barter is everywhere. Honour and Chastity! Behold the complacent salesman retailing the Good and True. One can even buy a so-called Religion, which is really but common morality sanctified with flowers and music. Rob the Church of her accessories and what remains behind? Yet the trusts thrive marvelously, for the prices are absurdly cheap, --a prayer for a ticket to heaven, a diploma for an honourable citizenship. Hide yourself under a bushel quickly, for if your real usefulness were known to the world you would soon be knocked down to the highest bidder by the public auctioneer. Why do men and women like to advertise themselves so much? Is it not but an instinct derived from the days of slavery?

RULE #1 Market your business to the customer YOU WANT. Most beauty businesses try to be everything to everyone. It's exhausting and expensive promoting yourself to everyone. Most people simply give up. Focus on the customers you really want. What is your passion, what do you excel in? Who is your ideal customer? What would you ideally like to do every day in your business? Focus on what you want to do and the clients you want, and market directly to them and only them.

One of my best days was the one on which I persuaded a group of seamen from the Archipelago to join in a single corporation in order to deal directly with retailers in the towns. I have never felt myself more usefully employed as a ruler.

There may be little room for the display of this supreme qualification in the retail book business, but there is room for some. Be enterprising. Get good people about you. Make your shop windows and your shops attractive. The fact that so many young men and women enter the teaching profession shows that there are still some people willing to scrape along on comparatively little money for the pleasure of following an occupation in which they delight. It is as true to-day as it was in Chaucer's time that there is a class of men who "gladly learn and gladly teach," and our college trustees and overseers and rich alumni take advantage of this and expect them to live on wages which an expert chauffeur would regard as insufficient. Any bookshop worthy of survival can offer inducements at least as great as the average school or college. Under pleasant conditions you will meet pleasant people, for the most part, whom you can teach and form whom you may learn something.

Under a $652-million clandestine program code named GENIE, the NSA, CIA, and special military operatives have planted covert digital bugs in tens of thousands of computers, routers, and firewalls around the world to conduct computer network exploitation, or CNE. Some are planted remotely, but others require physical access to install through so-called interdiction—the CIA or FBI intercepts shipments of hardware from manufacturers and retailers in order to plant malware in them or install doctored chips before they reach the customer.

So he strode, and ran, and hurried home. He emptied into the ever-useful pocket-handkerchief the little meal remaining in the mug. Mary would have her tea at Miss Simmonds’; her food for the day was safe. Then he went upstairs for his better coat, and his one, gay red-and-yellow silk pocket-handkerchief — his jewels, his plate, his valuables, these were. He went to the pawn-shop; he pawned them for five shillings; he stopped not, nor stayed, till he was once more in London Road, within five minutes’ walk of Berry Street — then he loitered in his gait, in order to discover the shops he wanted. He bought meat, and a loaf of bread, candles, chips, and from a little retail yard he purchased a couple of hundredweights of coal. Some money still remained — all destined for them, but he did not yet know how best to spend it. Food, light, and warmth, he had instantly seen were necessary; for luxuries he would wait. Wilson’s eyes filled with tears when he saw Barton enter with his purchases. He understood it all, and longed to be once more in work that he might help in some of these material ways, without feeling that he was using his son’s money.

The unemployment rate for young black men post-apartheid shot up, sometimes as high as 50 percent. What happens to a lot of guys is they finish high school and they can’t afford university, and even little retail jobs can be hard to come by when you’re from the hood and you look and talk a certain way. So, for many young men in South Africa’s townships, freedom looks like this: Every morning they wake up, maybe their parents go to work or maybe not. Then they go outside and chill on the corner the whole day, talking shit. They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one will give them a fishing rod.

Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore. When it launched in 1995, Amazon could claim to be “Earth’s largest bookstore” because, unlike a retail bookstore that might stock 100,000 books, Amazon didn’t need to physically store any inventory—it simply requested the title from its supplier whenever a customer made an order. This quantum improvement was so effective that a very unhappy Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit three days before Amazon’s IPO, claiming that Amazon was unfairly calling itself a “bookstore” when really it was a “book broker.

Every year or so I like to take a step back and look at a few key advertising, marketing, and media facts just to gauge how far removed from reality we advertising experts have gotten. These data represent the latest numbers I could find. I have listed the sources below. So here we go -- 10 facts, direct from the real world: E-commerce in 2014 accounted for 6.5 percent of total retail sales. 96% of video viewing is currently done on a television. 4% is done on a web device. In Europe and the US, people would not care if 92% of brands disappeared. The rate of engagement among a brand's fans with a Facebook post is 7 in 10,000. For Twitter it is 3 in 10,000. Fewer than one standard banner ad in a thousand is clicked on. Over half the display ads paid for by marketers are unviewable. Less than 1% of retail buying is done on a mobile device. Only 44% of traffic on the web is human. One bot-net can generate 1 billion fraudulent digital ad impressions a day. Half of all U.S online advertising - $10 billion a year - may be lost to fraud. As regular readers know, one of our favorite sayings around The Ad Contrarian Social Club is a quote from Noble Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who wonderfully declared that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I think these facts do a pretty good job of vindicating Feynman.

Dana daydreamed of one day being able to set her agenda at B.Altman with the same courage and tenacity as the woman who was now driving the VW while speaking animatedly about her travel plans for the near future. She would be journeying to India in search of exotic merchandise for the store’s Indian extravaganza, a lavish event planned by Ira Neimark and Dawn Mello to compete with Bloomingdale’s Retailing as Theater movement. The movement was the brainchild of Bloomingdale’s Marvin Traub, who staged elaborate presentations such as China: Heralding the Dawn of a New Era. Typical extravaganzas featured fashion, clothing, food, and art from various regions of the world. “I’ll bring back enough items to make Bloomingdale’s blush!” Nina said confidently. “And I’m not just talking sweaters, hats, and walking sticks. I’ll stop first in the Himalayas and prowl the Landour Bazaar.” Lynn Steward ~ A Very Good Life

COOKBOOK FOR THE MODERN HOUSEWIFE The cover was red with a subtle crosshatch pattern and distressed, the book's title stamped in black ink- all of it faded with age. Bordering the cookbook's cover were hints of what could be found inside. Alice tilted her head as she read across, down, across, and up the cover's edges. Rolls. Pies. Luncheon. Drinks. Jams. Jellies. Poultry. Soup. Pickles. 725 Tested Recipes. Resting the spine on her bent knees, the cookbook dense yet fragile in her hands, Alice opened it carefully. There was an inscription on the inside cover. Elsie Swann, 1940. Going through the first few, age-yellowed pages, Alice glanced at charts for what constituted a balanced diet in those days: milk products, citrus fruits, green and yellow vegetables, breads and cereals, meat and eggs, the addition of a fish liver oil, particularly for children. Across from it, a page of tips for housewives to avoid being overwhelmed and advice for hosting successful dinner parties. Opening to a page near the back, Alice found another chart, this one titled Standard Retail Beef Cutting Chart, a picture of a cow divided by type of meat, mini drawings of everything from a porterhouse-steak cut to the disgusting-sounding "rolled neck." Through the middle were recipes for Pork Pie, Jellied Tongue, Meat Loaf with Oatmeal, and something called Porcupines- ground beef and rice balls, simmered for an hour in tomato soup and definitely something Alice never wanted to try- and plenty of notes written in faded cursive beside some of the recipes. Comments like Eleanor's 13th birthday-delicious! and Good for digestion and Add extra butter. Whoever this Elsie Swann was, she had clearly used the cookbook regularly. The pages were polka-dotted in brown splatters and drips, evidence it had not sat forgotten on a shelf the way cookbooks would in Alice's kitchen.

What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.

Tricia loved New York because loving New York was a good career move. It was a good retail move, a good cuisine move, not a good taxi move or a great quality of pavement move, but definitely a career move that ranked amongst the highest and the best. Tricia was a TV anchor person, and New York was where most of the world’s TV was anchored. Tricia’s TV anchoring had been done exclusively in Britain up to that point: regional news, then breakfast news, early evening news. She would have been called, if the language allowed, a rapidly rising anchor, but... hey, this is television, what does it matter? She was a rapidly rising anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understand- ing of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn’t care. Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else in life becomes eerily easy. Tricia had only ever missed one opportunity. These days it didn’t even make her tremble quite so much as it used to to think about it. She guessed it was that bit of her that had gone dead.

Do you really stick to your written opinions?” asked Vernou, with a satirical expression. “Why, we are retailers of phrases; that is how we make a livelihood. When you try to do a good piece of work — to write a book, in short — you can put your thoughts, yourself into it, and cling to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit down to write a tradesman’s circular.

Then I got to the point: “I don’t think any other retail company in the world could do what I’m going to propose to you. It’s simple. It won’t cost us anything. And I believe it would just work magic, absolute magic on our customers, and our sales would escalate, and I think we’d just shoot past our Kmart friends in a year or two and probably Sears as well. I want you to take a pledge with me. I want you to promise that whenever you come within ten feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him. Now I know some of you are just naturally shy, and maybe don’t want to bother folks. But if you’ll go along with me on this, it would, I’m sure, help you become a leader. It would help your personality develop, you would become more outgoing, and in time you might become manager of that store, you might become a department manager, you might become a district manager, or whatever you choose to be in the company. It will do wonders for you. I guarantee it. Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me Sam.

The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Turgenev's poem: he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart. Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom desire coordinated in the light of all experience- can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM. Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.… Bezos’ vision of the online retailing universe was so complete, his Amazon.com site so elegant and appealing, that it became from Day One the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online. And that, it turns out, is everyone.

History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.

-Write out a conversation with your inner voice. Begin the entry with a question directed to yourself, then write your mental response. It may help to label the different voices A and B. Dialogue writing is a very effective way to get to the heart of the matter. The following passage is an example of typical dialogue writing: A: Tomorrow is a big day. You have an interview at a college. How do you feel? B: I am really nervous. This is the first interview and I don’t know what it is going to be like. A: What are you afraid of? B: I’m afraid I’ll stutter and say something stupid. I’m worried the person will ask a question and I won’t know what to say. A: What do you want to discuss? B: I think it is good that I was on the basketball team for four years. That shows commitment and dedication. I also got decent grades and earned a blue ribbon at the science fair. A: What about your hobbies outside of school? B: I really like to read. I could mention that. I could talk also about the vacations my family has taken. They are pretty interesting. I enjoy my part-time retail job. A: It sounds like you do a lot. B: I guess I am good at organizing my life and accomplishing what needs to be done. Hey, that would sound good in an interview! -Try focused “freewriting.” Pick one topic, such as school, friends, or family, and write everything that comes to mind about that topic. Write for at least ten minutes or until you’re certain that you have run out of things to write. -Write your belief system. Start by writing “I believe…” at the top of a clean page. Then write whatever comes to mind. It may help to ask yourself questions when you get stuck such as “What do I believe about friendship?” “What is my personal style?” or “What are my gifts and abilities?” -Write about an event from your perspective, then write about the same event from someone else’s point of view. For example, if you had a hard time answering a question during class, write about how you felt, what you thought, and how you behaved. Next, pretend you are the teacher writing about the same event. What do you think he or she was thinking? How did he or she act? This exercise is a great way to show that there are multiple ways of seeing the same situation.

We had heard rumours of what people referred to as a ‘phantom accounting system’, also called zappers and phantom ware. This phenomenon was unheard of in South Africa at the time. The more formal term used to describe this kind of criminal financial-management software is a ‘sales-suppression system’. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in which South Africa has observer status, issued a guide on these systems in 2013.10 On the surface, the technology seems like a supposedly normal accounting system, used mainly by retailers. It has all the expected features: it records stock, sales, invoices, receipts and taxes. It can print daily, weekly and monthly accounting records. Yet the software has a feature that can blank out certain sales and receipts. You can set it to suppress, for instance, every fourth sale, or random sales of a particular value, whichever you prefer. The effect is that, on paper, your stock, sales and receipts would balance for tax purposes. All you would have to do is click on a secret place on the screen, or type a particular code on the keyboard, and the unrecorded sales and receipts would reflect. One would then be able to take this money out of the company’s takings for the day, week or month, and people would be none the wiser.

It's not that we're dumb. On the contrary, many millions of people have exerted great intelligence and creativity in building the modern world. It's more that we're being swept into unknown and dangerous waters by accelerating economic growth. On just one single day of the days I have spent writing this book, as much world trade was carried out as in the whole of 1949; as much scientific research was published as in the whole of 1960; as many telephone calls were made as in all of 1983; as many e-mails were sent as in 1990.11 Our natural, human, and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt. Laws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these flows have not been able to keep up. A good example is what is inaccurately described as mindless sprawl in our physical environment. We deplore the relentless spread of low-density suburbs over millions of acres of formerly virgin land. We worry about its environmental impact, about the obesity in people that it fosters, and about the other social problems that come in its wake. But nobody seems to have designed urban sprawl, it just happens-or so it appears. On closer inspection, however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand-but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. "Out of control" is an ideology, not a fact.

Scrupling to do writings relative to keeping slaves has been a means of sundry small trials to me, in which I have so evidently felt my own will set aside that I think it good to mention a few of them. Tradesmen and retailers of goods, who depend on their business for a living, are naturally inclined to keep the good-will of their customers; nor is it a pleasant thing for young men to be under any necessity to question the judgment or honesty of elderly men, and more especially of such as have a fair reputation. Deep-rooted customs, though wrong, are not easily altered; but it is the duty of all to be firm in that which they certainly know is right for them. A charitable, benevolent man, well acquainted with a negro, may, I believe, under some circumstances, keep him in his family as a servant, on no other motives than the negro's good; but man, as man, knows not what shall be after him, nor hath he any assurance that his children will attain to that perfection in wisdom and goodness necessary rightly to exercise such power; hence it is clear to me, that I ought not to be the scribe where wills are drawn in which some children are made ales masters over others during life. About this time an ancient man of good esteem in the neighborhood came to my house to get his will written. He had young negroes, and I asked him privately how he purposed to dispose of them. He told me; I then said, "I cannot write thy will without breaking my own peace," and respectfully gave him my reasons for it. He signified that he had a choice that I should have written it, but as I could not, consistently with my conscience, he did not desire it, and so he got it written by some other person. A few years after, there being great alterations in his family, he came again to get me to write his will. His negroes were yet young, and his son, to whom he intended to give them, was, since he first spoke to me, from a libertine become a sober young man, and he supposed that I would have been free on that account to write it. We had much friendly talk on the subject, and then deferred it. A few days after he came again and directed their freedom, and I then wrote his will.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

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Located on 9th Avenue in New York City, B& H Photo is the largest non-chain photo and video equipment store in the United States and the second largest in the world —only Yodobashi Camera in downtown Tokyo is bigger. The owners, along with many of their employees, are Hasidic Jews who dress just as their eighteenth-century ancestors did in Eastern Europe. On any given day, 8,000 to 9,000 people pass through the front door. Yet 70 percent of their business is online, serviced by a 200,000-square-foot warehouse located nearby in Brooklyn. Even in a competitive marketplace, B& H won’t conduct business on the Sabbath or on about a half-dozen Jewish holidays during the year. They close their doors at 1 p.m. on Fridays and keep them closed all day Saturday, the biggest shopping day of the week. During Sabbath, customers can peruse the B& H website, but they can’t make an online order. Recently a customer asked the B& H director of communications how they could close not just the retail store but also the website on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the busiest shopping day of the year. The director simply replied, “We respond to a higher authority.” 17

Penster: Whatever you have been learning from life once lost and returned to you (book) published online at Smashwords and distributed possible everywhere of retailers, sites, libraries, bookstores & channels, also has been accepted into the Smashwords Premium Catalog. This began shipping out to retailers. Smashwords ships approved book of Penster and updates out to most retailers same day (indeed within minutes or hours), and to Barnes & Noble hourly.

his peers have expressed considerably more skepticism. “There is nothing Tesla [can] do that we cannot also do,” Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said in June 2016. Two years earlier, he had asked customers not to buy the Fiat 500e electric car, because the company lost $14,000 on the sale of each one. Fiat would sell the minimum number of electric cars needed to meet government mandates and “not one more,” he said. In April 2016, Marchionne continued that theme in an interview on the sidelines of his company’s annual meeting, this time responding to the price of the Model 3. If Musk could show him that the car would be profitable at the $35,000 price tag, Marchionne said, “I will copy the formula, add the Italian design flair, and get it to the market within twelve months.” The German automakers have been even more dismissive. In November 2015, Edzard Reuter, the former CEO of Daimler, called Tesla a “joke” and Musk a “pretender,” suggesting in an interview with a German newspaper that Tesla didn’t stand up to serious comparison with “the great car companies of Germany.” Daimler, BMW, and Volkswagen were slow to accept that Tesla could one day challenge their market dominance. “German carmakers have been in denial that electric vehicles can create an emotional appeal to customers,” Arndt Ellinghorst, an automotive analyst at Evercore ISI, told the Los Angeles Times in April 2016. “Many still believe that Tesla is a sideshow catering to a niche product to some tree-hugging Californians and eccentric US hedge fund managers.” GM wasn’t quite so blasé. In 2013, then CEO Dan Akerson established a team within the company to study Tesla, based on the belief that it could be a big disrupter. GM’s Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid sedan that could drive about forty miles in full electric mode, had won Motor Trend’s 2011 Car of the Year, but GM was looking further into the future. At the 2015 Detroit auto show, it unveiled a concept of the Chevy Bolt, a two-hundred-mile electric car that would retail for $30,000 (after a $7,500 rebate from the US government). It was seen as a direct response to Tesla and new CEO Mary Barra’s biggest risk since she took over in 2014. Wired magazine celebrated the Bolt’s impending arrival with a February 2016 cover story about how GM had beaten Tesla “in the race to build a true electric car for the masses

Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, is a legend one day and a laggard the next. Retail video rental is a cash cow—until Netflix carves the industry into flank steak. All the while, the business cycle itself swooshes without much warning from unsustainable highs to unbearable lows like some satanic roller coaster.

Retail managers know that while their official vendors are large multinationals like Procter & Gamble and Hindustan Unilever Limited, what they are actually dealing with is someone like ‘Agarwal & Gupta Distributors’, the RS of the MNC. And so, while a good relationship with HUL can be developed by promoting their products, the truth is that a good relationship with the RS can be developed mainly by promoting his working capital availability. The RS is not merely a supplier of goods. He is a vital link in the whole retail chain and can be underestimated only at one’s peril. This is exactly what one large retail chain figured out early, and used to get the most amazing competitive advantage. Supermarket retail has a built-in advantage not available to traditional retailers. On the buying end, they buy bigger quantities and get a substantial period of time to make payment to the suppliers compared to smaller retailers, who sometimes have to pay cash on delivery. On the selling side, no customer gets credit at a supermarket. You scan, you bill, you pay and go — that’s the supermarket way. For the kirana, however, most regular customers expect a ‘khata’, a monthly account. Kirana customers buy through the month and pay only at the end. Supermarkets, by design, therefore, buy on liberal credit and sell on cash. Therefore, they are ‘cash surplus’ on a day-to-day basis. Their competitors, the kirana stores, are not. This particular retailer decided to make the payment terms more favourable to the supplier. So where the industry practice was eight days, this retailer reduced it to four days. In effect, the retailer halved the credit period, thus influencing the vendor’s working capital availability favourably. The vendor, in turn, now had a stake in the retailer’s growth and continued prosperity. The relationship soon turned into a win-win partnership. The vendor developed ingenious ways to enhance the retailer’s market share in various catchments.

Promotion stocks came to the retailer ahead of the rest of the market. Also, they usually got an extra lot even after the end of the promotion Newly launched products came to the retailer first. The customers got more choice, faster, leading to favourable word-of-mouth publicity Local display and consumer sampling budgets were always directed liberally at the retailer Vendors ensured that no slow moving inventory was stuck in the retailer’s stores; they wanted nothing to choke the pipeline The retailer also received the best in-class margin from the distributor If some items were in short supply, the vendor would ensure the retailer was the last one to go out of stock In effect, the consumers found more products, fresher stocks and more promotions in the retailer’s stores compared to the general market. This wasn’t something actively created by either the vendors or the retailer, but was a byproduct of good trading practices. Just one move based on a trading community insight— everyone has less money in the bank than needed — hurled the retailer into a virtuous growth cycle, with all the vendors pushing in one direction, with them. Most people in the business would not give a second look at changing these trading practices. If the payment norm is eight days why modify it? Surely the wholesalers, too, know what they’re letting themselves in for? And the vast volumes offered by organised retail should offset the stress of extending credit. Isn’t that how it works? One retailer managed to peep behind the curtain of wholesaler business practices and understood what a boon more money in the bank was to the trade. And look at the gains they reaped for this seemingly insignificant insight!

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RETAILERS KNOW THEIR shelfspace is a valuable resource. But this is a recent discovery; in the past, they gave it away, then they thought of selling it. Manufacturers either paid directly, via slotting allowances etc., or paid in materials and labour to make the shelves more attractive and better organised; then they paid both as demand for shelfspace exceeded supply. More recently, for fast turnover items, manufacturers such as Frito-Lay have used a direct delivery and merchandising service where their people will spend pretty much all day in store refilling shelves to their and the store’s mutual benefit.

When Starbucks launched its instant coffee brand in Japan in April 2010, they invited customers to participate in a four-day taste challenge to see whether they could taste the different between Starbucks VIA Coffee Essence (known as VIA Ready Brew everywhere else) and their fresh-brewed coffee. Over one million samples were given away at their 870 retail stores, and five months later more than 10 million sticks had been sold, making it one of their most successful new product launches. Starbucks

Simplicity IS the new EDLP (every day low price)!

During his extensive career as an airmail pilot with Aéropostale, Antoine served as the company’s station manager in barren Villa Bens. During the Second World War, although he was older than most, Saint-Exupéry joined the Free French Air Force. On July 31, 1944, as fate would have it, he disappeared on a reconnaissance mission flying a P-38 Lightning over the Mediterranean, somewhere south of Marseille. The body of a French pilot was found a few days after Antoine’s disappearance and was buried in Carqueiranne, France. After his death he became an icon and national hero throughout France. For a fleeting moment I wondered what anyone could do to pass the time of day at such a remote location…. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry used his time to write books! Today the word Aéropostale takes on an entirely new meaning. It has become the name of an American retailer of casual apparel for young people. Go figure….

David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.

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Timing Your Rewards Retail guru Rick Segel famously said, “The behavior that is rewarded is the behavior that is repeated.

The company even drew unlikely customers. From rural Arkansas, operating just five comically cheap-looking stores—a rounding error compared with the largest retailers—Sam Walton made his way to an IBM conference for retailers. While he shied away from investing anything in any emotional aspect of retailing, delivering the lowest prices meant mastering logistics and information. To one speaker at the conference, Abe Marks, modern retailing meant knowing exactly “how much merchandise is in the store? What’s selling and what’s not? What is to be ordered, marked down or replaced? . . . The more you turn your inventory, the less capital is required.” Altering his first impression, Marks found that Walton’s simpleton comportment masked his genius as a retailer, eventually calling him the “best utilizer of information that there’s ever been.” A little over two decades later, Sam Walton would become the richest man in America; he would attribute his competitive advantage to his investment in computing systems in his early days. The small-town merchant who expected that knowing his customers’ names or sponsoring the local Little League team would give him some enduring advantage simply didn’t understand the sport. American consumers, technocrats at heart, rewarded efficiency as reflected by the prices on the shelves, not the quaint sentiments of a friendly proprietor. To gain this efficiency, information systems were seen as vital.

Daphne used to help organize closets before she was old enough to work retail. You know how Paris Hilton treated Kim Kardashian like her closet bitch? That was basically Daphne. Came from nothing, worked her way up, and now she’s crushing it. Can build an Eiffel Tower out of French toast, gets gifted Chanel bags, never seems to have a bad fucking hair day, and just announced that she’s designing a capsule collection for Revolve. With her kids.

First of all, in my day, James Cash Penney had called his hourly employees “associates,” and I guess I always had that idea in the back of my head. But the idea to try it at Wal-Mart actually occurred to me on a trip to England. HELEN WALTON: “We were on a tennis vacation to England. We were there to see Wimbledon. One day, we were walking down a street in London, and Sam, of course, stopped to look at a store—he always stopped to look in stores wherever we went—anywhere in the world, it didn’t matter. On that same trip, we lost a lot of our things in Italy when thieves broke into the car while he was looking at a big discount store. Anyway, he stopped at this one English retailing company, and I remember him saying, ‘Look at that sign. That is great. That’s what we should do.’ ” It was Lewis Company, J. M. Lewis Partnership. They had a partnership with all their associates listed up on the sign. For some reason that whole idea really excited me: a partnership with all our associates. As soon as we got home, we started calling our store workers “associates” instead of employees.

Perhaps nothing better typifies the strange and often accidental nature of chemical science in its early days than a discovery made by a German named Hennig Brand in 1675. Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of color seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept for months in his cellar. By various recondite processes, he converted the urine first into a noxious paste and then into a translucent waxy substance. None of it yielded gold, of course, but a strange and interesting thing did happen. After a time, the substance began to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame. The commercial potential for the stuff-which soon became known as phosphorus, from Greek and Latin roots meaning "light bearing"—was not lost on eager businesspeople, but the difficulties of manufacture made it too costly to exploit. An ounce of phosphorus retailed for six guineas—perhaps five hundred dollars in todays money-or more than gold. At first soldiers were called on to provide the raw material, but such an arrangement was hardly conducive to industrial-scale production. In the 1750s a Swedish chemist named Karl (or Carl) Scheele devised a way to manufacture phosphorus in bulk without the slop or smell of urine. It was largely because of this mastery of phosphorus that Sweden became, and remains, a leading producer of matches.

If retail giants are claiming shortages on the first day of a strike, it's obvious they are using the situation as an opportunity to raise prices and increase profits.

But simple consumer reluctance to switch providers is a major obstacle to competition in retail financial services. It is a well-known joke in the industry that customers change their spouses more often than their banks. They all seem the same: why transfer your loyalty from Tweedledee to Tweedledum? This inertia on the part of retail buyers is common across all financial products. Credit cards have consistently been one of the most profitable retail banking products. Bank of America, ‘first mover’ in this industry, continues to hold a strong position, despite aggressive attempts by entrants to solicit new business. Many people just do not like buying financial services, and minimise the time and effort they devote to their purchase as a result. The days when retail customers of financial services were rewarded for their loyalty are long gone. The replacement of a relationship-based culture by a transaction-based one means that the best deal is almost always obtained by shopping around aggressively rather than by building trust. Customer perceptions have lagged behind this harsh reality. But

Building wealth is like dieting; you can’t reasonably expect to lose a significant amount of weight in 1 day. It takes consistent, disciplined behavior over several months or years.

How does a retail security guard tell a shopper from a shoplifter? Answer: a shoplifter doesn’t look at tags.

Bookstore game is nothing but a combination of coffee shop and retail game.

it now takes an average of between two hundred fifty and three hundred days for a typical Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company to move a new product from invention to retail stores’ shelves—and

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

Retail [10w] The first and last sale of the day are best.

Likewise, Jimmy Swaggart Ministries lost its bid to avoid sales taxes,4 Native American believers had no right to direct how the federal government develops federal land,5 Jewish merchants could not force the weekly day of no retail sales to coincide with their Sabbath,6 and a Native American family could not refuse to obtain a Social Security number for their 2-year-old daughter as a precondition to getting federal welfare.

You’re too self-absorbed. You think you’re important. You think people actually care enough to form opinions about you based on what you do in a coffee shop or retail store.

Another thing you need to understand is what we now call the “core competencies” of your organization. What are we really good at? What do our customers pay us for? Why do they buy from us? In a competitive, nonmonopolistic market—and that is what the world has become—there is absolutely no reason why a customer should buy from you rather from your competitor. None. He pays you because you give him something that is of value to him. What is it that we get paid for? You may think this is a simple question. It is not. I have been working with some of the world’s biggest manufacturers, producers, and distributors of packaged consumer goods. All of you use their products, even in Slovenia. They have two kinds of customers. One, of course, is the retailer. The other is the housewife. What do they pay for? I have been asking this question for a year now. I do not know how many companies in the world make soap, but there are a great many. And I can’t tell the difference between one kind of soap or the other. And why does the buyer have a preference—and a strong one, by the way? What does it do for her? Why is she willing to buy from one manufacturer when on the same shelves in the United States or in Japan or in Germany they are soaps from other companies? She usually does not even look at them. She reaches out for that one soap. Why? What does she see? What does she want? Try to work on this. Incidentally, the best way to find out is to ask customers not by questionnaire but by sitting down with them and finding out. The most successful retailer I know in the world is not one of the big retail chains. It is somebody in Ireland, a small country about the size of Slovenia. This particular company is next door to Great Britain with its very powerful supermarkets, and all of them are also in Ireland. And yet this little company has maybe 60 percent of the sandwich market. What do they do? Well, the answer is that the boss spends two days each week in one of his stores serving customers, from the meat counter to the checkout counter, and is the one who puts stuff into bags and carries it out to the shoppers’ automobiles. He knows what the customers pay for. But let me go back to the beginning: The place to start managing is not in the plant, and it is not in the office. You start with managing yourself by finding out your own strengths, by placing yourself where your strengths can produce results and making sure that you set the right example (which is basically what ethics is all about), and by placing your people where their strengths can produce results.

AS their peculiar perfume is the chief association with spices, so sorcery is allied in every memory to gypsies. And as it has not escaped many poets that there is something more strangely sweet and mysterious in the scent of cloves than in that of flowers, so the attribute of inherited magic power adds to the romance of these picturesque wanderers. Both the spices and the Romany come from the far East—the fatherland of divination and enchantment. The latter have been traced with tolerable accuracy, If we admit their affinity with the Indian Dom and Domar, back to the p. 2 threshold of history, or well-nigh into prehistoric times, and in all ages they, or their women, have been engaged, as if by elvish instinct, in selling enchant. merits, peddling prophecies and palmistry, and dealing with the devil generally ill a small retail way. As it was of old so it is to-day— Ki shan i Romani— Adoi san' i chov'hani. Wherever gypsies go, There the witches are, we know.

Different leaders experience the whirlwind in different ways. A senior executive with one of the world’s largest home-improvement retailers describes it this way: “We don’t have dragons swooping down and knocking us off our priorities. What we have are gnats. Every day we have gnats getting in our eyes, and when we look back over the last six months, we haven’t accomplished any of the things we said we were going to.” You’ve almost certainly found yourself facing the whirlwind when you were trying to explain a new goal or strategy to someone who works for you. Can you remember the conversation? Your mind is centered clearly on the goal and you are explaining it in easy-to-understand terms. But, while you’re talking, the person you are talking to is backing slowly out of the room, all the while nodding and reassuring you, but trying to get back to what they would call the real work, another name for the whirlwind. Is that employee fully engaged in achieving that goal? Not a chance. Is he trying to sabotage your goal or undercut your authority? No. He’s just trying to survive in his whirlwind.

What Batu thought Eric should say to Charley, if he really liked her: "Come live with me. Come live at the All-Night." What Eric thought about saying to Charley: "If you're going away, take me with you. I'm about to be twenty years old, and I've never been to college. I sleep days in a storage closet, wearing someone else's pajamas. I've worked retail jobs since I was sixteen. I know people are hateful. If you need to bite someone, you can bite me.

The paradox is that although most shopping trips are Quick Trips, these shoppers are not coming to the store for the same products each time. In fact, we found that the average CPG category is purchased on a Quick Trip just 38 percent of the time. Quick Trip shopping must be composed of a very broad and changing variety of CPG categories. In a single week, a household might make a Quick Trip for milk, chips, and beer on one day, whereas a day or two later they might take another Quick Trip seeking light bulbs and paper towels.

Alibaba reported record sales of $9.3 billion on “ Singles Day”, easily beating last year’s figure of $5.8 billion. Singles Day is by far the biggest day of the year for online retailers. Jack Ma, boss of the e-commerce giant, said that 275m packages would be shipped from orders made on November 11th. The day was originally dedicated to Chinese singletons but has recently morphed into a frenzy of consumerism.

December 20, 1999, Juno Online Services unveiled a trailblazing business plan: to lose as much money as possible, on purpose. Juno announced that it would henceforth offer all its retail services for free—no charge for e-mail, no charge for Internet access—and that it would spend millions of dollars more on advertising over the next year. On this declaration of corporate hara-kiri, Juno’s stock roared up from $16.375 to $66.75 in two days.6

Two hours a day for two days per week. Four hours. At $7.25 an hour, that gave him a gross income of $29 a week. He is also now a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers International, the union that represents food workers, retail clerks, and farm workers. His monthly dues for the UFCW are $25, all taken out of his first week’s check. That makes Owen arguably the most selfless labor activist in America, with 86 percent of his pay going to support his union.

Thanksgiving has become the first day of what in now thought of as the “Holy or Holiday Season.” The “holidays” as they are generally known, are an annually recurring period of time from late November to early January. These days are also recognized by many other countries as well, with the “Christmas Tree” and all the trimmings, generally being considered secular. This period of time incorporates the shopping days, which comprises a peak season for the retail market. Regardless of religious affiliation, children and adults alike enjoy the many window displays and Christmas tree lighting ceremonies. To a great extent it really doesn’t matter that there are still some people believing that the commercialism of these holidays is blasphemy and that they should be reserved strictly for worship. There are virtually, no valid reasons why we can’t all enjoy these days in our own way. Children of all faiths and ages should be able to understand the true meaning and still be able to enjoy the music, surprises and magic of the season… This year we are again faced with a severely, politically divided country; with a great number of people fearing for their future. It might be too much to hope for, that politicians will be able to put aside their differences. Unfortunately many of them still believe that their hypocritical concept of Christianity is greater than that of their opposition. Regardless, they should however understand that we are all equal in the eyes of God as well as the law, and that America was built by a diverse people. Let us not slip back into a newer form of “Small Minded Bigotry,” but rather forge ahead in a unified way making our country stronger. The time has come to energize our nation by rebuilding our bridges and highways. Rebuilding our airports, investing in high-speed trains, and making education affordable is the way to a more productive future. If we head down this ambitious path of development, we will create jobs and put more people to work. It will help the middle class to regain their footing and it will strengthen our slowly growing economy. When our citizens earn more, the economy will lift us all out of the recession that so many.

The retail behemoth recently announced that it will boost starting hourly wages to $9 beginning in April. That’s a real and significant increase for the estimated 500,000 Walmart workers now working at or close to the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Even better, Walmart is planning for another increase to $10 in February 2016. And it’s throwing in other goodies. It’ll let workers take sick time beginning the first day they need it. It plans to give employees more control over their schedules. And it’s committing itself to a variety of measures to advance hourly workers through the ranks, leading to ever greater positions of responsibility. What’s next? Profit sharing?

When I was a kid…We believed it was butter, and we drank whole milk. Now, coffee, cheese, flour, oil, sugar, salt, beer, and ice cream are bad for us, and we should eat foods that are improved, no-fat, lo-cal, lite, organic, unsaturated, decaffeinated, artificial, or taste awful, and contain enough dyes and preservatives to look appetizing and last a long time in their pretty packaging that is 43% of their retail cost figuring in advertising.

The sun was setting on Coruscant. Shadows ran like black water, filling up the the alleys first, then climbing steadily higher, a tide of darkness rising to drown the capital. Twilight’s gloom spread over retail districts and medcenters, and crept like a dark stain up the walls of the Chancellor’s residence as the sun slipped below the horizon. Soon only the rooftops were gilded with the day’s last yellow light; then the shadows conquered them, too, swarming up

As I turn on my computer: Come to Me, I want to connect with you. As I make a phone call to talk through my stress with a friend: Call on Me! As I scroll through Facebook: Don’t follow them, follow Me. As I open up Instagram: Come to Me, open up to Me. As I binge watch another late-night TV show: Come. To. Me. As I start a text, complaining to a friend about my day: Delete that; don’t complain to her, come to Me. As I link over to Amazon Prime for a little retail therapy: Come to Me, I’m a Wonderful Counselor. As I run in to Starbucks for something sweet: My words are sweet as honey. Come to me. As I turn to comfort food: Come to Me, I’m the Great Comforter.

In Trading, Every Setback is a Setup for a Comeback.

The gun industry collectively reinforced Glock’s pitch that small handguns were the perfect response to crime-ridden streets. The prolific Massad Ayoob advised in Shooting Industry, a periodical aimed at gun retailers: “Customers come to you every day out of fear. Fear is what they read in the newspaper. Fear of what they watch on the 11 o’clock news. Fear of the terrible acts of violence they see on the street. Your job, in no uncertain terms, is to sell them confidence.… An impulse of fear has sent that customer to your shop, so you want a quality product in stock to satisfy the customer’s needs and complete the impulse purchase.

According to research by retailer Littlewoods four year old girls ask an average of 390 questions a day. That works out at about one every 2 minutes while the long suffering parent is awake.

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What difference will a couple of days make? The election is weeks away. Rutherford can find the server on his own and figure out a way to get a copy to you. He’s a smart guy.” “It’s not that simple. For a start, the election. Yes, it’s a while away. But for thirty days leading up to it there’s what’s called a systems freeze. Nothing computer-related can be changed in any way. It’s the same kind of thing the credit card companies and online retailers do heading into Black Friday and Christmas. It makes sure no one loads new software that turns out not to work properly and screws everything up at their most critical time. So, if we can’t positively confirm that The Sentinel hasn’t been compromised before then, we have a real problem. And if—when—we get our hands on Rutherford’s server, we don’t even know what we’re looking for. There could be thousands of documents on there, and I very much doubt one of them will be labeled Identity of Russian Spy. All kinds of cross-referencing will be needed. Lateral thinking. Reading tea leaves and casting chicken bones, probably. So the bottom line, like I said, is we need that thing yesterday.

I’d barely closed the door behind me and tossed my keys into the little dish by the door when my phone rang. Not my cell phone, which was silent in my bag, but the old-school landline attached to the wall in the kitchen. It didn’t have caller ID, but I knew who it was. There was only one person in my life who had the number. “Hey, Mom.” “Hi, honey, I heard your car. Did you have dinner? We just finished eating, but I can fix you a plate.” “No. No, I’m fine. I ate when I was out.” I slid my little leather backpack off my shoulders, the buttery blue leather bag I’d bought just as Faire had ended—I hadn’t been kidding about the retail therapy—and dropped it onto my kitchen table. “I’m kind of tired; it’s been a long day. I think I’ll watch a little TV and turn in.” See? Semi-independence. Mom didn’t call every night, but often enough to remind me that in some ways—in most ways—I still lived at home. I loved my parents, but it was getting old. Hell, I was getting old. I was almost twenty-seven, for God’s sake. That feeling of getting older without really being allowed to grow up lingered, and that feeling combined with the sight of Emily’s engagement ring. I’m gonna miss her. Now that stray thought made sense. Getting married, becoming a wife. And what was I doing? Going out to Jackson’s every Friday night and posting the same selfies on Instagram. I needed to get a life. I needed another glass of wine.

Trap feminism says that Black girls who have ever rocked bamboo earrings, dookie braids, Baby Phat, lace fronts, or those who have worked as hoes, scammers, call-center reps, at day cares, in retail, and those who sell waist trainers and mink lashes on Instagram are all worth the same dignity and respect we give Michelle Obama and Beyoncé.

The audience for Channel 28, the PBS station in Los Angeles, was demographically perfect for Trader Joe’s. In those days, however, PBS did not accept overt commercials. Alice had been quite active as a volunteer at the station. Through her contacts, we made arrangements to sponsor reruns of shows that tied to Trader Joe’s, such as the Julia Child shows, The Galloping Gourmet, and Barbara Wodehouse’s series on training dogs, which proved very effective! These reruns were not expensive compared with sponsoring first-runs and they had very good audiences. All we got was a “billboard” announcing that Trader Joe’s was sponsoring the show, but this was a cost-effective way of building our presence in the community. Another way we promoted ourselves on public TV was to “man the phones” during pledge drives. Our employees, led by Robin Guentert who was running advertising at that time (Robin became one of the most important members of store supervision after 1982, then President of Trader Joe’s in 2002), would show up en masse at the station. They loved being on TV, and we got the publicity. Promoting through Nonprofits Most retailers, when they’re approached by charities for donations, do their best to stiff-arm the would-be donees, or ask that a grueling series of requirements need to be met. In general they hate giving except to big, organized charities like United Way, because that way they escape being solicited by all sorts of uncomfortable pressure groups. At the very beginning of Trader Joe’s, however, we adopted a policy of using non-profit giving as an advertising and promotional tool. We established these policies: Never give cash to anyone. Never buy space in a program. That is money thrown away. Give freely, give generously, but only to nonprofits that are focused on the overeducated and underpaid. Any museum opening, any art gallery opening, any hospital auxiliary benefit, any college alumni gathering, the American Association of University Women, the Assistance League, any chamber orchestra benefit—their requests got a very warm welcome. But nothing for Little League, Pop Warner, et al.; that was not what Trader Joe’s was about.

Word of Mouth: the Power of True Believers As everyone knows, word of mouth is the most effective advertising of all. Or, when in my cups, I have been known to say that there’s no better business to run than a cult. Trader Joe’s became a cult of the overeducated and underpaid, partly because we deliberately tried to make it a cult once we got a handle on what we were actually doing, and partly because we kept the implicit promises with our clientele. I used to work every Thanksgiving Day in one of the stores. They only let me bag, because I had lost all my checker skills. One Thanksgiving, a woman came in and asked for bourbon. I told her that we had none, because we had not been able to make the right kind of deal (this was after the end of Fair Trade, when we were deep in the Mac the Knife mode). “That’s all right,” she exclaimed. “I know what you’re trying to do for us!” Note the us. There aren’t many cult retailers who successfully retain their cult status over a long period of time. A couple in California are In ’n Out Burger and Fry’s Electronics. But across America, in every town, there’s a particular donut shop, pizza parlor, bakery, greengrocer, bar, etc., that has a cult following of True Believers. The old Petrini’s of the 1950s and 1960s had that status when it came to meat. Brooks Bros had that status until the 1970s. S. S. Pierce in Boston was another. But all of them failed to keep the faith. Beware of ever betraying the True Believers! The fury of a woman scorned is nothing compared with that of a betrayed cultee.

The Most Important Strategic Decision Was to Become a Genuine Retailer The fundamental job of a retailer is to buy goods whole, cut them into pieces, and sell the pieces to the ultimate consumers. This is the most important mental construct I can impart to those of you who want to enter retailing. Most “retailers” have no idea of the formal meaning of the word. Time and again I had to remind myself just what my role in society was supposed to be. Many of the policy decisions for a retailer boil down to this: How closely should we stick to the fundamental retailing job? “Retail” comes from a medieval French verb, retailer, which means “to cut into pieces.” “Tailor” comes from the same verb. The fact is that most so-called retailers don’t want to face up to their basic job. In Pronto Markets we did everything we could to avoid retailing. We tried to shift the burden to suppliers, buying prepackaged goods, hopefully pre-price-marked (potato chips, bread, cupcakes, magazines, paperback books) so we had no role in the pricing decision. The goods were ordered, displayed, and returned by outside salespeople. To this day, supermarkets fight with the retail clerks’ union to expand their right to let core store work be done by outsiders. Whole Earth Harry’s moves into wine and health foods had taken us quite a distance into genuine retailing. In our cheese departments we were literally taking whole wheels and cutting them into pieces. I took this as an analogy for what we should do with everything we sold. Getting rid of all outside salespeople was corollary to the programs that would unfold during the next five years. In Mac the Knife, no outsiders of any sort were permitted in the store. All the work was done by employees. The closest thing to it that I see these days is Costco, which shares many features with Trader Joe’s.

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in Parma and handles them very well. This is the choice of the Consorzio itself when it needs to ship the cheese within the United States for events. For high-quality balsamic, look for the full name Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena or Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Reggio Emilia. Italian law precludes the years of aging on the labels, but better retailers list it, and eight years is the minimum for the good stuff, though truly exceptional balsamic, the kind to be applied with an eyedropper to cheese and ice cream, should be at least twenty-five to fifty years and will always cost you more than a hundred dollars, sometimes much more, for a small bottle. The best are labeled by color, with silver and gold denoting the oldest. Again, Zingerman’s is an excellent resource for authentic standout balsamic vinegars. *“Paolo Rainieri” is an amalgam of Parma cheese makers I met, almost all male and almost all second, third, or fifth generation in their jobs. One had worked every day, save his two-day honeymoon, for thirty-five years.

20 percent and that's my final offer." Dog folded his arms across his chest in a move that I assumed was meant to intimidate. He had sizable muscle, but the effect was watered down by his My Little Pony tattoos. I could swear I saw Fluttershy wink. "Don't give me that 20 percent bullshit," I said. "I work in retail. I know the margins and I know you didn't buy these goods so everything is profit for you." "You didn't tell me she was a hard-ass." Dog glared at Jack. "I like to keep the good stuff to myself." "Give me the Boxing Day special," I said. "Six A.M. door crasher." His eyes widened. "40 percent?" I shook my head. "First five people in the door." "Sixty?" "Take it or leave it." I pulled out a wad of cash. We'd all chipped in to cover the costs in hopeful anticipation of a bigger return at the end. Dog took the money, but not before registering a complaint with customer service. "You said she was a newb," he said to Jack. "She's a smart and savvy newb." Jack grinned. "Gotta say, it's pretty damn hot.

Of course my handling of the crisis only made it worse. Angry, hurt, I often reacted with self-righteousness, petulance, anger. On some level I knew my reaction was toxic, counterproductive, but I couldn't stop myself. It's just not easy to remain even-keeled when you wake up one day, thinking you're creating jobs and helping poor countries modernize and enabling athletes to achieve greatness, only to find yourself being burned in effigy outside the flagship retail store in your own hometown.

it’s not that he’s gone but that he’s arrived.